The Other Anzacs (20 page)

Most interesting and in some ways amusing to see the poor old convalescent wounded soldiers come in. Some with arms in a sling, some on crutches, hands bandaged, heads bandaged. I used to feel so mightily proud of Syd’s bandaged head, quite the most conspicuous there, until one day another head similar to Syd’s walked in, but I quickly noticed with great inward pride that Syd’s bandaging was far superior. There the fashion is in style and cut of bandages—effect of war on fashions.
⁸

They left for England on 18 September on the
Tagus
. The next day, Elsie reflected: ‘Little did we think last 19th September that we should be leaving Egypt for England on a hospital ship with Syd as a patient! Strange that we should leave on our anniversary too!’ Syd would forever retain a groove in his scalp from the bullet wound.

That same month, Daisy Richmond was at Lemnos on the ship
Neuralia
when a wireless message came through that the troopship
Southland
had been torpedoed about thirty kilometres away. The
Neuralia
went to her aid immediately, but the ship was already listing and its lifeboats were full. Daisy began preparing the wards for the Australian, New Zealand and English survivors. When the ship drew near, those on the
Southland
and its boats ‘gave us a terrific cheer when then saw us coming at 14½ knots an hour . . . We went down to greet them and shook hands with them all. We were glad to see them and to hear how pluckily they had behaved.’
⁹

In Malta, Auckland nurse Lottie Le Gallais prepared herself for the next trip to the Dardanelles on the
Maheno
. It was not easy. To her dying day, Lottie said, she would never forget the weeks going back and forth to the Dardanelles. Each time a lighter left the shore with casualties the bugle sounded. For the next thirty-six hours the nurses would help load the patients on board, filling the ship’s cabins and decks.

We anchor about half a mile from [the] firing line—guns going off all round us, shaking the ship and startling the life out of me each time they begin. It’s a dreadful place Gallipoli, dreadful and awful. Don’t think I regret coming, the work is terrible but we are needed badly. The Australians and New Zealanders have made a glorious name for themselves everywhere. They bear their wounds, they have never been known to even flinch. I suppose the nurses in the hospitals have to work hard, but they get the men from the ships after we have washed and cleaned them. You probably don’t know what clean means—no-one could—what with flies and other creepers. The poor men!
¹⁰

She was still trying to find news of her brother Leddie. No one seemed to know his whereabouts. ‘I have not been able so far to find anyone who saw Leddie. I have met several who knew him, but they never hear what becomes of their chums.’
¹¹
Gallipoli frightened her. ‘I have a horror of that place, which I can’t get over; the shells I am used to and the noise and firing.’
¹²
Everyone said the peninsula was ‘hell and death’. And that was where her brother was.

At Alexandria, Mary Gorman had some good news. Her friend Catherine (Kitty) Fox, who was also from Waimate, had sent a postcard from Port Said where she was attached to No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital. They would catch up, but now, like Lottie Le Gallais, Mary was about to board the
Maheno
to sail to the Dardanelles. Aware of the danger now involved in sailing the Mediterranean, Mary wrote on 11 September, ‘I hope we won’t be torpedoed by the Germans.’ She wasn’t, and a month later Mary was back in Alexandria, nursing scores of bad typhoid cases. She had never worked so hard as that week. ‘Nothing all day long but wash patients—I will soon turn into an automatic washing machine, ’ she wrote with grim humour on 10 October. Adding to the desperate mood was the death of a British volunteer aid nurse from dysentery. ‘There was a military funeral . . . The last post was played and the whole thing was very sad.’

The night before, however, diminutive brown-haired Mary had had an all-too-brief interlude away from the hospital gloom. ‘I was taken out to dinner last night by a Captain Burke and wore my evening dress although we are not supposed to go out in anything but uniform. It is the last time I will be able to wear my dress as the silk has simply gone to pieces.’ She remembered that she had had ‘some very pleasant times’ in that dress. And there was the splendid news that she had been attached to No.1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital. Not only would she and Kitty Fox be re-united, but the hospital would be leaving Port Said for an unknown destination. ‘I am really excited about it as we don’t know where we may be sent, ’ Mary wrote. She would have to buy a camp kit, at a cost of six pounds. She might be refunded, but Mary knew that nothing in life was certain, particularly here.

13
THE SHABBY SISTERS

On the barren and windswept Aegean island of Lemnos, the guns at Gallipoli could be heard rumbling just sixty kilometres away as a large group of Australian nurses came ashore in August 1915, cheered by men on ships anchored in Mudros harbour. In their grey ankle-length uniforms, they made their way cautiously over a stony field while a bagpiper played them into camp. Aside from hospital ships, Lemnos was the closest location to Gallipoli where nurses could serve. The proximity fired their emotions. Staff Nurse Nell Pike, from Sydney, ‘could imagine no greater joy than to be working under the canvas so close to the gallant men of Anzac’.
¹

Just five hours away by sea, Lemnos was the perfect location for the Allies’ advance naval and military base. The huge, deepwater Mudros harbour was alive with action as hundreds of battleships, destroyers, troop transports and hospital ships came and went. Elsie Eglinton, on the transport
Ionian
, captured the sight as the sun rose over the port.

The water was very dark green and the shadows of all these huge battleships was thrown right across the harbour, the reflection of the sky in the water as it kept changing colour was beyond description— one minute it was crimson and the next like a sheet of gold, such vivid colours, quite different to the soft Egyptian skies.
²

The reality of working on Lemnos was far from enchanting, however. The conditions there were probably the worst experienced by any nurses during the war. Originally Lemnos was planned as a forward medical base to receive and treat slightly wounded troops so they could be sent back to the fighting after a few days. The plan broke down under the weight of casualties. Instead, the slightly wounded were sent to Egypt, while the more seriously wounded stayed on Lemnos. During July, four stationary hospitals had been established on the island, one of which was Australian. The War Office decided to upgrade facilities to cope with more serious cases and No. 3 Australian General Hospital, under Colonel Thomas Fiaschi, was sent to Lemnos.

For Matron Grace Wilson, the war was already closer than for most. Three months before, a Turkish sniper had killed her brother, Lance Corporal Graeme Wilson of the 2nd Australian Light Horse, at Quinn’s Post at Gallipoli. Shot in the thigh, he had bled to death, aged just twenty-five. Grace heard the news at Alexandria on 1 August, just before she left for Lemnos. She wrote to her sister Minnie: ‘Tell mother from me to be thankful if he fell in action—I am, after what I have seen. All I can hope is that he was killed at once.’
³

The process of establishing No. 3 General Hospital was chaotic. The hospital’s male staff arrived on Lemnos on 29 July, only a week before the August offensive was to be launched. The hospital’s equipment did not arrive for another three weeks. On 5 August, Grace Wilson arrived a day ahead of nearly 100 nurses who would staff the hospital. She found the situation ‘just too awful for words’, with no tents and only bits and pieces of equipment.

We are the first women to come so far, except for the sisters on the hospital ships. This waiting exhausts our spirits and roughing it will be beyond description. If you can imagine at present a bare piece of ground, covered with stones, from the size of pebbles to boulders, the men in their clothes lying on it, waiting, and we sisters imprisoned on a ship opposite, also waiting and doing nothing, and you have [No. 3 General Hospital] after touring for eleven or twelve weeks.
⁴

While they waited for their equipment, the sisters had to rely on the barest essentials, mostly from their own kits, such as small methylated spirit stoves, cotton wool and a few instruments. They tore up their own clothes for dressings. They tended hundreds of patients on the open ground, where the nurses also slept. As one plaintively wrote, ‘How we longed for a hole for our hips!’
⁵
Finally the tents arrived, and two rows extending to the water’s edge were pitched as the sisters’ quarters.

To cope with the casualties, two vast tent cities had sprung up around the harbour. The main Australian camp was at Mudros West, high above the harbour on the bare and roadless promontory known as Turk’s Head. It was here that No. 3 General Hospital and No. 2 Australian Stationary Hospital were set up, along with two Canadian stationary hospitals and one British. The pressure on them was heavy. By mid-October, just under 4000 cases passed through No. 3—thirty per cent Australian, thirteen per cent New Zealand and fifty-seven per cent British and Indian.
⁶

In the two months to October, 57, 000 sick and 37, 000 wounded men were evacuated from the beaches at Gallipoli.
⁷
Hospital accommodation at Mudros was increased to 9000 beds, about half of them Australian. But the flood of injured troops had become a crisis. So-called ‘black ships’— ordinary armed transports—were kept busy plying from Lemnos to Egypt, Malta and England. In the three months from August, more than 100, 000 sick and wounded left Mudros.

A water shortage on Lemnos made it difficult to treat the wounded—or even to give them drinks, as Olive Haynes soon discovered. She had been keen to go to the island, to work at No. 2 Stationary Hospital, but soon found she could not wash the men coming off the hospital ship
Assaye
, anchored in the harbour with 700 badly wounded on board. It was virtually impossible for the nurses to take a bath, and many cut their hair short to keep it clean. Until a distiller was installed, water had to come from the warships. Even then, the nurses were left just two buckets of water outside their tents for washing in enamel bowls. If they were lucky, they occasionally got hot water from the cookhouse.

Sanitary arrangements on the island were primitive. Wells were not protected and contained ‘a large number of germs with some pathogenic organisms’.
⁸
Amoebic dysentery was rampant, and a Canadian matron and two orderlies died of it. Already beset with lumbago and neuralgia, Olive Haynes fell ill with dysentery—Lemnitis, as it was known—along with another six Australian and five Canadian sisters. Olive could not go on duty, and ‘felt pretty bad all day’. Nell Pike noted that doing the laundry for the dysentery cases was an enormous problem. Soiled linen had to be put aside for long periods to be washed when water became available. When the laundry went putrid, it was destroyed in bonfires.

Snakes, scorpions and centipedes were rife. Moles were also an issue. As she recuperated, Olive searched her bed every night and generally managed to catch something. Every time she woke up, ‘I clasp the Insectiban and sprinkle it over me and the bed.’
⁹
After her bed broke, she had to sleep on the floor. Tev Davies wrote to her family about the moles. ‘I have never seen one but on my tent floor there is a fresh bulge each morning where they have been burrowing. I am quite expecting to be lifted heavenward some night, a patient told me they are a little larger than rats.’
¹⁰
The work was tiring and, Tev added tongue in cheek, ‘we get plenty of air’.