Hell Hath No Fury (34 page)

The decision was made to surrender to the Japanese, and the nurses remained with the soldiers and stretcher cases on the beach while other members of their party went in search of food and the enemy, who arrived in a patrol consisting of an officer and ten men, on February 16.

The Japanese officer ordered all the men who could walk to proceed around a nearby headland, where they were shot and bayoneted. One of them, Private Kinsley, survived and managed to crawl away. The Japanese then turned to the nurses, who were ordered to walk into the sea. The senior nurse, Matron Drummond, who had been wounded in the attack on the
Vyner Brook
and had to be supported by two of her colleagues, told them, “Chin up, girls, I'm proud of you and I love you all.”

When the water reached waist height, the women were raked by machine-gun fire and all were killed, with the exception of Vivian Bullwinkel, who floated away, wounded in the hip. When the Japanese left the beach, she struggled ashore. Three days later she stumbled across Private Kinsley, dressed his wounds, and helped him into the jungle, from which they eventually emerged to give themselves up to the Japanese. They concealed their wounds, saying that they had survived a shipwreck and had swum ashore. Kinsley succumbed to his wounds shortly afterward, but Bullwinkel survived the war to give evidence about the massacre at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, although the officer thought to have ordered it had committed suicide in 1945.

After the war, Bullwinkel rose to the top of her profession, retiring as matron of the Queen's Memorial Infectious Diseases Hospital, Melbourne. In 1947 she received the Red Cross's Florence Nightingale Medal. She was appointed MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1973 and made an officer of the Order of Australia in 1993, the year in which she attended the unveiling ceremony of a memorial to the nurses who had died on Banka Island.

Reference: Peter Thompson,
The Battle of Singapore,
2005.

CHISHOLM, MAIRI,
AND
ELSIE KNOCKER

British World War I Nurses

In August 1914, Dr. Hector Munro, a Scotsman, organized a flying ambulance unit to work with the Belgian army. Munro was a feminist and included four women in the unit: an American, Helen Gleason; two Englishwomen, Lady Dorothea Fielding and Elsie Knocker; and the eighteen-year-old Mairi Chisholm, a fellow Scot.

Elsie Knocker was a widow who had some nursing experience and who shared with Chisholm a passion for motorcycling. After two months of operating with the ambulance corps in Belgium, Knocker decided to establish a first-aid post immediately behind the front line. In November 1914, Knocker and Chisholm set themselves up in a cellar in the Belgian town of Pervyse, which had been leveled by German shelling and lay just behind the front-line trenches. Such proximity to the front line was in contravention of British regulations, and until 1918 the two women worked with Belgian drivers and orderlies. By early 1915, British newspapers had dubbed them “the Heroines of Pervyse,” and King Albert of Belgium had personally pinned on their tunics the Order of Leopold.

As Mairi Chisholm confided to her diary, the motor-ambulance drive to the rear was fraught with difficulty and danger:

Taking wounded to hospital 15 miles back at night was a very real strain—no lights, shell-pocked, mud-covered roads, often under fire, men and guns coming up to relieve the trenches, total darkness, yells to mind one's self and get out of the way, meaning a sickening slide off the pavie [road] into deep mud—screams from the stretchers behind one and thumps in the back through the canvas—then an appeal to passing soldiers to shoulder the ambulance back on the pavie. Two or three of these journeys by night and one's eyes were on stalks, bloodshot and strained. No windscreen, no protection, no self-starters or electric lights to switch on when out of reach of the lines—climb out to light with a match, if possible, the carbide lamps.

After heavy shelling destroyed their first post, the two women moved into the ruins of a house and, after a fund-raising tour in Britain, found a new home in a concrete structure swathed in sandbags and hidden inside the ruins of another house. In this desolate landscape of flooded shell craters and rotting corpses, Elsie Knocker was married to an aristocratic Belgian airman, who had been brought down in no-man's-land near the post, and became the Baroness de T'Serclaes. Amid the carnage, Mairi Chisholm still had time to see beauty. One of her diary entries comments: “The ruins by moonlight were strangely beautiful and when it reigned over the trenches it was hard to believe that life was at a premium.”

In 1917 the two women of Pervyse were awarded the Military Medal, which had been created in 1916 and was open to women (the first woman to receive the award had been their colleague from the flying ambulance days, Lady Dorothea Fielding). Early in 1918 both women were badly injured in a German gas attack. The baroness never returned to the trenches, and after suffering more wounds in a second gas bombardment, Knocker was forced to call it a day, and the Belgians closed down the post.

Reference: Elsie Shapter Knocker T'Serclaes,
Flanders and Other Fields: Memoirs of the Baroness de T'Serclaes,
1964.

DIX, DOROTHEA

US Nurse and Social Reformer, b. 1802, d. 1887

Born in Hampden, Maine, to farming stock, Dix had an unhappy childhood and lived with her grandmother in Boston from the age of twelve. At nineteen, she opened a school in her grandparents' house and also wrote elementary science textbooks and religious works.

On a visit to England in 1830s, Dix was influenced by a number of social reformers. When she returned to America in 1841, she taught at a Sunday school in Cambridge's House of Correction, in which she discovered to her horror that insane women were confined in barbaric conditions. Dix's response was to make a detailed investigation of local prisons, almshouses, and insane asylums and presented a report to the Massachusetts legislature. The report, combined with tireless speech-making and pamphlet-writing, led to a substantial investment in new facilities dedicated to the humane treatment of the mentally ill. As a direct result of Dix's efforts the number of asylums in the United States increased from 13 in 1843 to 123 in 1880, and she later undertook reforming missions to Scotland, the Channel Islands, France, Turkey, and Russia.

At the start of the American Civil War, Dix offered her services to the Union, and in June 1861 was placed in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals. Like
Florence Nightingale
(see Chapter 8) she met with official hostility and skepticism that nurses could satisfactorily perform their duties in a military environment. Nevertheless, the determined Dix put her stamp on the Army Nursing Corps, recruiting more than 3,000 women and turning public buildings into hospitals. Her methods, however, were autocratic: she declined to accept applicants from religious sisterhoods and those under the age of thirty. She authorized a uniform of plain black or brown and forbade the wearing of jewelry. Unsurprisingly, she became known as “Dragon Dix,” a nickname she confirmed by regularly clashing with military bureaucrats and pointedly ignoring administrative details.

Under Dix's leadership the standards of military nursing markedly improved. She was concerned with the welfare of her corps and the men they cared for, often obtaining medical supplies from private sources when the government proved unforthcoming. At the end of the Civil War, Dix returned to her work for the mentally ill. She spent her last days in the hospital that she had founded in Trenton, which she called her “firstborn child.”

Reference: Barbara Witteman,
Dorothea Dix, Social Reformer
(Let Freedom Ring), 2003.

ETHERIDGE, ANNA

US Civil War Nurse, b. 1839, d. 1913

In
Women of the War,
published in 1866, “Gentle Anna's” service in the Civil War was commended in the following words: “Few soldiers were in the war longer, or served with so slight intermission, or had so little need of rest.”

Born Anna Lorinda Blair to prosperous parents in Wayne County, Michigan, she married unsuccessfully at sixteen. In the summer of 1861, while in Detroit, Etheridge enlisted in the Second Michigan Volunteers. She was one of twenty young women who offered their services as
vivandières
(see Chapter 5) to the regiment. Within a few months only Etheridge remained.

She first saw action at Blackburn's Ford, Virginia, nursing the wounded on the battlefield and bringing water to the dying (see also
Molly Pitcher,
Chapter 4). After the second Battle of Bull Run(1862), and at the urging of General Philip Kearny, the regiment provided her with a horse, which she rode side-saddle into the front line, frequently dismounting to come to the aid of wounded men while fighting continued around her. Having bound up their wounds and given them water or some other “stimulating drink,” Etheridge would then gallop off on her mission of mercy undeterred by the musket balls that often passed through her clothes. She was armed at all times with two pistols. Her brigade commander, General Berry, declared that Etheridge remained cool and self-possessed under fire as fierce as any he had experienced himself. The gallant General Kearny suggested that Etheridge be made a regimental sergeant, but he was killed shortly afterward and Etheridge never received a sergeant's rank or pay. She was, however, awarded a medal, the Kearny Cross.

When not in the field or working in military hospitals, Etheridge oversaw the cooking at brigade headquarters. On the march, she accompanied the ambulances and the surgeons. At the nightly bivouacs, she wrapped herself in a blanket and slept on the ground “with the hardihood of a true soldier.”

Etheridge was present at the First Battle of Bull Run (1861) and at Antietam (1862), after which Second Michigan was sent to Tennessee. She decided to remain with the Army of the Potomac and enlisted with the Third and then the Fifth Regiments, serving at Fredericksburg (1862) and Chancellorsville (1863), where she was wounded when a Union officer hid behind her in a vain attempt to save his life. On several occasions she rallied demoralized troops and, seizing the colors, led them in a charge. She faltered only once, at the Battle of the Wilderness (1864), when a teenage orderly to whom she was talking fell into her arms, killed instantly by a bullet to the heart. Etheridge was so disoriented that she ran into the advancing Confederate line, through which she passed unharmed. The Union troops dubbed her “the brave little soldier in petticoats.”

In September 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered that all women be removed from military camp in his theater of operations, and thereafter Etheridge worked in the hospital at City Point, Virginia, although it seems she was with Fifth Michigan when it mustered out in July 1865.

After the Civil War, Etheridge found temporary employment at the Treasury Department and in 1886 formally requested a pension of fifty dollars a month. A year later Congress granted her a monthly pension of twenty-five dollars. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. A poem of 1866 celebrates Etheridge's Civil War exploits:

Hail, dauntless maid! whose shadowy form,

Borne like a sunbeam on the air,

Swept by amid the battle-storm,

Cheering the helpless sufferers there,

Amid the cannon's smoke and flame,

The earthquake roar of shot and shell,

Winning, by deeds of love, a name

Immortal as the brave who fell.

Reference: P. Brockett,
Women's Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience,
1867.

KNOCKER, ELSIE, see CHISHOLM, MAIRI,
and
ELSIE KNOCKER.

INGLIS, ELSIE

British World War I Doctor, b. 1864, d. 1917

The daughter of an official in the Indian Civil Service, Inglis was born on a Himalayan hill station. Her parents ensured that she had a good education, and she attended the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, studying under Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake, the first woman physician in Scotland, before moving to the University of Glasgow to promote a rival women's faculty and winning the right to read medicine alongside men.

In 1892 Inglis had qualified as a licentiate of all the Scottish medical schools. She then moved to London, where she was horrified by the shoddy standards of care endured by many female patients. In 1894 she returned to Edinburgh and with another female doctor, Jessie MacGregor, established Scotland's only maternity center run by women. She traveled widely, visiting clinics in Europe and the United States, including the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. She also became politically active and was one of the founders of the Scottish Women's Suffragette Federation. A philanthropist, Inglis frequently waived her fees and personally funded the convalescence of poor patients.

On the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Inglis offered to provide the British army with fully staffed Scottish Women's Hospital (SWH) medical units, only to be told by a War Office official, “My good lady, go home and sit still.” However, the French took Inglis seriously, dispatching two of her units to France and a third, headed by Inglis herself, to Serbia. She dealt with a typhus epidemic before she and the members of her unit became prisoners of the Austrians, who overran Serbia in the autumn and winter offensives of 1915. Thereafter Inglis and her team tended both Serb and Austrian wounded in military hospitals in Krusevac.

Repatriated in February 1916, Inglis immediately organized and accompanied an SWH medical team, which was dispatched by sea to Russia. She also ensured the establishment of an SWH hospital at Salonika, in northeast Greece, where an Anglo-French expeditionary force and the rebuilt Serbian army had been bottled up since the spring of 1916.

By 1917, Inglis had organized fourteen medical units for the Belgian, French, Russian, and Serbian armies. When she sailed back to England from Russia in November 1917, she was exhausted and stricken with cancer. With a huge effort, she said farewell to her Serbian staff and, after the ship docked, managed to walk ashore. She died the next day.