The Other Anzacs (51 page)
The rail line to the hospital was hit and three men were killed not far from the sisters. By now it was nearly 6 p.m., but there was no sign of the train. The commanding officer of No. 47 Clearing Station suddenly appeared with five lorries to take all the nurses to Rosières, halfway to Amiens. On the way they passed two dead Germans lying in a ditch near a crashed plane. They arrived at No. 47 at 10 p.m. to find wounded men streaming in.
The next day Matron Baird took seven of the sisters by rail to Villers-Bretonneux, where they were billeted in a large school along with refugees. A day later there were about 500 patients, stretchers and walking cases waiting for them. They fed them all and dressed the worst wounds, bringing the abdominal and chest cases inside and leaving the rest in the open. However, a day later the number of wounded had swollen to about 8000 and was still growing. Stretcher cases lay on the ground for hundreds of metres around. Soon about 10, 000 had been through the clearing station, and still they came. That night, in bright moonlight, the Germans began bombing the town. ‘We were nearly home when one seemed to fall beside us with a deafening splitting sound, ’ Florence recounted. ‘We dived into an archway, the air seemed full of fumes and gas, two other Sisters behind us fell flat on the pavement. However none of us were hit and we got to the school.’
And still came the wounded, thirsty, dirty and covered with blood. Hospital trains arrived but could not cope with the numbers. The nurses heard a shout that the train was leaving and ran down the hill, passing through the hut where the worst cases were, to grab their haversacks. The harrowing scene that followed etched itself on Florence’s memory.
We were too hurried to think of the effect our leaving would have on them. I will never forget the expression on their faces when they saw we were going. ‘Oh they are leaving us, ’ ‘They are going, ’ I heard one man say. I went back to tell him we were going on a truck train and they would be going as soon as the hospital train arrived. It didn’t seem to comfort him much. They looked as if they thought their last hope had gone, poor things, we hated leaving them, and it made us realise our being there meant more than the actual work we did.
They scrambled into the van. The train, which was full of walking wounded, travelled slowly and stopped just after nightfall in brilliant moonlight. They tried to sleep, but at about 10 p.m. the Germans were overhead. A traumatic night of bombing followed.
Fritz was over us, and driven off by Archies and back again and driven off and back, so on all night. A lot of the men went out in the fields. A dud dropped beside us, the line blown up in front of us. We heard in the morning we were in a cutting just out of Amiens and the town was bombed severely that night. It certainly was the most nerve-racking thing we had been through, to hear Fritz’s engines above us all night. It was a relief to hear the bark of the Archies and the sing of the shells through the air. We could hear the bombs explode, they seemed all round us.
They passed through Amiens about 11 a.m. on the 27th and saw telegraph wires smashed, splintered building frames and broken glass everywhere. The train pulled up, and the boys found a goods train loaded with food. ‘They helped themselves, but did not forget us, ’ Florence recalled, ‘we were presented with bread, oranges, figs, milk, cheese, apples. We had tea and sugar which we gave the boys.’ Relieved, they drew breath as the boys ‘made their tea at the engine’.
There was little relief elsewhere. At No. 1 Australian General Hospital at Rouen, Annie Shadforth ‘had the wind up horribly’. There was no time to rest. She was on night duty in a forty-bed ward that received acute gas patients during the German push. She and her orderly ‘spent the best part of the night administering oxygen to patients and trying to keep delirious ones in bed’.
18
All lights went out in an air raid, leading to ‘a dreadfully anxious few hours’ during which Annie paced up and down ‘in the dark with the aid of a hurricane lamp trying to calm delirious patients’ who were trying to get out of bed.
At No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital, Doullens, Elsie Tranter was soon using her new skill in giving anaesthesia. There were four operating tables in constant use, ‘and poor fellows lying on stretchers on the theatre floor, waiting till we could attend to them’. One soldier walked in ‘with half his jaw blown away’, supported by two wounded comrades. Elsie was in the theatre from 7 a.m. till 8 p.m. Then she worked in the chapel attending to the new admissions till early morning.
She had already survived a bombing raid in which ‘a fairly large piece of shell ripped my tent, grazed past my face and passed right between my hands, tearing the kit bag and various things that were in it and burying itself in the bag’. And she had taken on an important task. ‘I have many “last” letters to write now to mothers in Australia and New Zealand. Many of the boys have entrusted me with their precious messages. They are game to the end.’
19
By 24 April Elsie had administered anaesthetics to 227 patients. ‘It is very tiring and trying work, for most of the men are badly wounded and give us a lot of anxiety.’ A month later, shortly after being sent to Dieppe, she recalled her last night at Doullens as dreadful, with sixty-four bombs dropped in the vicinity. At Dieppe Elsie learned that the Australian Director-General of Medical Services, Major General Neville Howse, had forbidden Army Nursing Service members to work or be trained as anaesthetists. No explanation was given, but it is believed Australian doctors had insisted that only they should be permitted to perform anaesthesia.
20
Despite her disappointment, Elsie kept toiling. One day a dog, a setter, came in with the walking wounded. It ‘seemed almost human’ and had a shrapnel wound in its forepaw. It waited with the men, then followed on to where a sister was dressing wounds. ‘When she found time she dressed him and he seemed so grateful. The quartermaster has taken charge of him and every morning the dear doggie makes his way to the dressing station and waits till someone has time to attend to him. He is nearly well now but still limps rather badly.’
21
Tev Davies was at No. 25 General Hospital on the coast at Hardelot, south of Boulogne, professionally satisfied to be in the thick of things after finding work in England too quiet. She wrote to her mother about the German offensive.
We are getting in gassed cases now, Mum, such cruel stuff it is, burns their skin causing blisters, causing inflammation of the eyes, and all mucous membranes, chokes up the lungs and irritates the stomach causing vomiting besides which, it has a depressing effect on the patient, the treatment is chiefly with alkalies, then one runs all day with inhalations, gargles, douches, eye baths, Mercy me! Fritz. Is fiendish alright [
sic
]. Not warfare at all, it is slaughter absolutely.
22
The gassed men, Tev found, needed constant attention. ‘Nearly all lose their voices, poor old things whisper away. You have to bend right down to hear what they say, then you get the gas down your own throat, my voice gets quite husky at times.’
23
No one, not even those in hospitals, could escape the effects of the German offensive. Paris was no longer safe.
The German onslaught headed towards Paris, where Elsie Cook and Fraser Thompson were working. Big guns pounded the city from 120 kilometres away. Parisians were startled, and Elsie joined the thousands who took refuge in bomb shelters.
Paris shelled by long-range guns! All Paris awakened this morning to read this astounding news. So that all yesterday’s mysterious regular explosions, which popular opinion decided had come from the ‘new invisible aircraft’, had been shells dropping in from more than 75 miles away. And still coming in—again, early at 7 a.m., a loud explosion proclaimed another day’s bombardment and every quarter of an hour these explosions occurred, sometimes quite near—five fell around the hospital, several people killed, but the shells fall without much force and are not doing much damage.
The shelling resumed next day at 7 a.m. ‘Germans trying a big push for Amiens, ’ Elsie noted. ‘Things grave, but everybody calm and confident.’ After six days of fighting, with the line now east of Albert and Roye, she wrote, ‘It seems awful to think of the Germans being there, there where we used to walk and ride and see such a long way behind the lines.’
1
The Allies halted the offensive in late March, leading the Germans to change strategy from a single massive attack to a three-prong attack, including a thrust south of the Somme to separate the British and French armies. Another attack came on the southern flank, and a third on the northern flank towards the sea. Nellie Crommelin witnessed long lines of French troops marching to the front.
Up they went cheerfully knowing full well the awful task in front of them and there on arrival tired, dust covered, hungry thirsty they went straight into battle. They fought and died in thousands and those who escaped wounded came down to us in the middle of the night in their hundreds. What a night we had, but oh how happy we are to be doing this work. It makes us feel we are helping just a little bit, and the wonderful self denial and courage of them all the time, all the time!!!
2
Shifted to a temporary hospital with the French Army, Nellie was becoming more emotionally involved and, in the space of a few days, said she now saw herself as ‘Military in every sense of the word’.
I feel a little bit prouder to think I am really so much nearer it makes us feel we are sharing the dangers to be a little bit closer to our men, nearer to comfort them, nearer to help them, nearer to prove to them that we also can play our little part. And yet women seem useless, so helpless, against the awful strain of the present. I feel that if only all our millions could be transformed into men—real men. I mean, those who would not want to stay behind with the old people and children, and used to stem the avalanche of brutes that presses so relentlessly against our sorely tried troops, how gladly many of us would answer the call to help.
3
The situation grim, the Croix-Rouge quickly assigned Elsie Cook and Fraser Thompson to a hospital at Compiègne, northeast of Paris and halfway to Amiens. But the hospital was burnt down by an incendiary bomb before they left Paris. As they awaited new orders, five German shells landed on a nearby church, killing seventy-five people and wounding ninety. The shelling came near the hospital where Elsie and Fraser worked, but they were not there long: they had been assigned to a specialist fracture hospital at Senlis, between Paris and Compiègne.
They arrived to find a lack of food, poor sleeping quarters and wards full of ‘very sick and miserable looking wounded’. With no food to eat, they breakfasted ‘on a soup plate of half cold coffee’ and were kept busy ‘washing the patients and making beds and trying to get things clean and in order generally’. They were given a tent to sleep in, furnished with duckboards, a stove and some partitions made from sheets. ‘Green grass and daisies form a virginal carpet, our beds, with upturned packing cases, make up the furniture, ’ Elsie noted wryly.
4
Elsie struggled to cope with the stream of broken bodies as the Germans mounted their last desperate efforts to win the war. Fear and heartbreak were everywhere. She noted that all the hospitals between Senlis and the front were being evacuated. Refugees were passing along in front of her hospital, driving their cattle and carrying odds and ends of family possessions on carts. ‘Wounded pouring in by the hundreds—the receiving room full to overflowing—one long line of ambulances outside the hospital, disgorging and tearing off, others flying in at the gates, covered in dust. Up all night going hard.’
5
Amid the din of air raids and the boom of long-range guns, Elsie and Fraser frantically dressed wounds, hearing rumours that they themselves would soon have to evacuate ‘as the Bosch are getting so near’. The workload was heavy for a fortnight. Thirty kilometres away at Villers-Cotterets, Nellie Crommelin, could hear the thunder of the cannon coming nearer and ‘the hateful purring of the Gothas’ during 27 to 28 May. Sleep was impossible. In a letter scrawled to her mother, she wrote:
Be brave little mother and all dear ones. Remember I shall never be taken prisoner by the Bosches and if I die it is for the sake of beautiful France and her suffering soldiers and the honour of our own dear Australia. God bless you all and keep you safe and well and unafraid. Long live Australia and Vive la France.
6
In a later letter, Nellie explained that quite suddenly the hospital was inundated with stretchers and limping men: men with arms in slings, men with heads bound up, men covered with mud and blood. There were torn, mangled and quivering bodies everywhere. ‘We put them on the beds at first and we bound up their dressings afresh waiting for the surgeon to come or the X Ray man to examine them. Later we put them on the floor, into the corridors and still they came. All night we worked and the morning found us in a sea of disorder and filth indescribable.’