The Other Anzacs (37 page)
There were few comforts. Because sugar was in short supply, the nurses had to do without cake two days a week. That was the least of their troubles. The winter of 1916–17 was the coldest recorded in France for a century. Water in shell holes froze into ice blocks a metre deep, and the frozen ground made digging trenches all but impossible. But at least it did away with the mud, and in places the roads even became dusty. The weather had been changeable all the previous summer and ‘people began to mutter darkly that the fearsome bombardments on the Western Front were causing vibrations in the atmosphere and affecting the climate’.
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Pearl Corkhill’s first sighting of snow at No. 1 General Hospital in Rouen entranced her. There was a great cry of ‘Oh, it’s snowing, ’ she wrote. ‘So as soon as there was enough snow to make into balls they started snow balling. The boys started to snow ball every sister they saw. They used to wait for us round tent corners.’
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By January–February 1917, however, the temperature was often from twelve to eighteen degrees Celsius below freezing, and moats around the chateaux were frozen solid.
At Rouen, blocks of ice floated in the River Seine, while inside the hospital fountain pens burst as the ink froze and expanded. Letters home had to be written in pencil. ‘We are having a water famine because all the water is frozen in the main pipes, ’ Alice observed late in January. The sisters could not wash the patients in the morning and they were forced to use the solid ice out of the fire buckets to make cocoa for them. A coal shortage made Alice ‘nearly mad with the cold’. Her head hurt and her back ached, ‘so intense that I did not know what to do. It sometimes seems impossible to carry on.’
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For six days there was no water. Finally the hospital was connected to Rouen’s main supply.
At No. 2 Australian General Hospital, in Wimereaux, Elsie Eglinton lamented, ‘We have to melt the ice over our spirit lamp before we can get a wash. The floors freeze directly they are washed and we slip on the ice. I spilt a cup of coffee down my apron last night and it was soon frozen stiff, sometimes it’s almost unbearable. Now we are getting floods of rain and strong winds which nearly blow our tents down.’
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Sister Ida Willis, at No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital in Amiens, saw water flowing from the houses into the street gutters freeze hard; it had to be cut daily. Those like her who had transferred just a few months earlier from Egypt ‘felt the change of climate keenly’. The town’s old men and women scraped with pitchforks through the household refuse piled in the snow in front of the houses in the hope of finding tiny lumps of coal, coke or anything that would burn. The sisters took pity on them and gave them their left-over rolls for breakfast.
During January 1917, it was so cold many of the stretcher cases came in almost frozen. ‘They do enjoy a big mug of cocoa and hot water bottles in their beds, ’ Elsie Eglinton wrote. ‘Some of the patients who can walk are given a hot bath and they have a short distance to walk and before we can get them into their bed, their hair is frozen stiff.’
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The night sisters tried to stay warm by wearing balaclavas and looked ‘like a lot of teddy bears getting around in all our woollies’. The hospital was ‘so short of water now that we have to melt the snow to wash our patients in’.
We couldn’t even get a cup of tea for breakfast this morning. The water pipes are all frozen. Some of the boys walked over to the frozen pond and broke the ice with an axe and brought some back in lumps. We then made a cup of tea in our ward. We get a few falls going to our tents in old post holes etc but owing to the quantity of clothes we wear we only bounce and don’t get much hurt.
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The spring on Elsie’s gramophone snapped twice because of the cold, but ingenuity and repairs kept it serviceable. Her friend Olive Haynes had been posted back to No. 2 General Hospital at the start of 1917, and she was pleased that the gramophone had been mended. ‘We have to keep it in a blanket and hot water bag at night—it feels the cold so terribly, ’ she noted whimsically.
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To save water, Elsie re-boiled water emptied from hot water bottles and used it to make coffee for her boys in the ward. ‘My poor orderly complains that his boots are frozen still when he puts them on at night and they make his feet sore.’
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She had to stand a bottle of ink on the stove before she could write a letter. A doctor later recalled the scene in the tent wards with the wind howling through and only snow water to drink:
I can see the sisters now—their noses blue and nipped with cold— their fingers like bulky sausages in thick woollen gloves, cap comforters peaking up over their hair and strapped round their ears—warm bed socks tied on over their shoes—a sight to laugh at, chaff at, yet to love and reverence. We would make our rounds sharing a hot water bottle, cuddling it alternately to thaw our hands: then, after a round, often perfunctory, in spite of repeated resolves to stick it out, off I’d go to a delicious ‘Fugg’ in our mess, lying torpid in front of a roasting stove, sucking a most comforting pipe, chivalrously leaving sister and the boys to stick out the arctic wards as best they might.
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As the sisters shivered in France, across the Channel another of the first
Kyarra
contingent, Kath King, married Major Gordon Carter in Southall, England. They had planned to marry in March, but the wedding appears to have been brought forward to 31 January when, in November 1916, AIF Matron-in-Chief Evelyn Conyers told Kath she would be sending her and her sister Wynne to France ‘very shortly’. Wynne was one of Kath’s bridesmaids, and she showered the couple with confetti when they left by train on their honeymoon. For Gordon, it was ‘18 days of the most glorious holiday I ever expect to have’.
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Kath agreed, writing in her diary that their time on the Devon coast was ‘most delightful’.
With the rules requiring her now to resign from Australian Army Nursing Service, Kath ended her work as an Army nurse. She started work at Harefield Park hospital in London as an assistant house sister, while Gordon went back and forth to the battlefield.
In earth torn up by shells, bombs and tank tracks, it takes seasons for flowers to appear. In the spring of 1917, thousands upon thousands of white crosses stood where primroses and poppies had once bloomed. While men had died in legions, centuries-old villages and towns had been reduced to ruins. Ypres and Pozières were razed, Bapaume blown to pieces, Arras all but demolished. There was a ghostly quality to the landscape. Limbless oaks and beeches stood bleakly in what once were woods. Fields that had supported aeons of agriculture were reduced to a quagmire of craters. Troops came out of the trenches soaked to the skin and covered in a thick, glue-like mud. Some did not make it out but drowned in the pools of grey slop.
This was the countryside that the Anzac sisters on the Western Front came to know, especially those in the casualty clearing stations. They had no illusions about what they were confronting: the wastage of life, the pain and misery. They removed filthy, blood-encrusted uniforms, bathed the men, administered blood, gave injections, monitored vital signs, debrided, sutured and dressed wounds. In 1917, during the Ypres Offensive, they too felt the impact of long periods of monotony punctuated by frenetic action and extreme terror. The trauma of war was taking its toll.
Danger came in many forms and on different levels, from shelling and bombs to gas. The Germans first used poison gas in the Second Battle of Ypres just nine months after the war started, shocking the civilised world but heralding the dawn of a new era of warfare. Soon its use was widespread: first chlorine and phosgene, then mustard gas. After just two minutes breathing in as little as one part chlorine to 10, 000 parts air, people developed lesions in their lungs. Phosgene was more powerful and could be distributed in an even lower concentration, one part to 50, 000. Inhaling it for only one minute reduced men to helplessness. They went blue as they struggled for air. By the time the war ended, 185, 000 troops had suffered its effects. Mustard gas caused terrible burns. While many gas victims returned to duty, the worst affected were permanently debilitated. Many suffered intensely for weeks or months before dying.
Sister Evaline Jones, a Victorian-trained nurse working at the British No. 1 Casualty Clearing Station, saw many gas victims. After one attack, more than 350 gassed men were brought in within twenty-four hours. ‘Their eyes are all in a terrible condition and their skin often burnt, occasionally a blister, but mostly skin unbroken, but burnt a deep plum colour.’
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At Wimereaux, Elsie Eglinton was startled by an explosion. Five minutes after a troop train had gone past, the railway line was blown up. ‘We thought that it was a bomb at first, dropped from an aeroplane but it was a time exploding bomb placed on the line. If the train had been a few minutes later there would have been a great loss of life.’
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At Amiens, Ida Willis, who had survived several air raids, noted that ‘occasionally pieces of metal or leaden balls found their way through the shutters of our bedrooms. On one occasion a piece of flying metal actually cut my shoe while I sheltered in a doorway during a raid which started when I was on my way home from the hospital.’
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And the danger would soon be worse. Much worse.
This was the world that Elsie Tranter, a grey-eyed, twenty-nine-year-old petite nurse from Geelong, found herself in not long after she arrived from Australia. She was posted to British General Hospital No. 26, near Etaples. The village had become a giant hospital city staffed by Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and British medical units. Row after row of tents and huts made up an enormous camp containing seven hospitals. Elsie had dreamed of going to the war since that first Sunday in August 1914 when she had heard the cry of the Melbourne
Herald
paper boys: ‘
Herald
Extra’ordinary! Special, here y’are.’
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Now she was in the midst of it and learning fast.
The suffering of the boys sickened her, and she knew that the pounding of the guns in the distance meant more casualties would be filling the wards. She quickly became accustomed to the sight of horrific wounds—and filled with admiration for the soldiers’ stoicism. ‘The boys are absolute bricks and make no complaints when their dressings are being done. The wounds are ghastly—any one of the boys in “D” if in hospital at home would be considered in need of a day and night Special, but here is just one of the many.’
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Elsie was in a ward that was using the Carrel-Dakin method. There were hundreds of tubes to be syringed every two hours around the clock. ‘I did dressings most of the morning. The boys are so frightfully mutilated it would not be possible for one person to dress them. Every minute is more than full.’ She thought it just as well. ‘If we did not have to work hard all the time we could not stand the strain of the awfulness of it all. Work and want of time to stop and think is a boon to us. With our boys it is not only their wounds but so many of the poor dears are so frightfully sick from a rotten gas infection. They are tired out when they come to us.’
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