A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (14 page)

Said this Jock to a member of a certain Highland regiment, ‘But ye’ no Scoatch, are ye?’

‘Well, my father was Scotch, my mother was Irish and I was born in Greece, so what would you call me?’

Puff – puff – pu-u-ff.

Jock removes his stubby pipe, glances sideways and snorts out, ‘Maaconochee.’

‘A bit of a tickler, that!’ gurgled out one of the boys when he was subsequently told.

‘Aye, jammy!’ was the apt reply.

The hard frost continues. This afternoon I was walking down the road when a convoy went out. The dust cloud raised by the cars from the dry, hard road was equal to that on a hot August day.

What a picture the cars made! All along the straight, tree-bordered road as far as the eye could see, was car after car, a long steady uninterrupted line of them,
with no horse vehicle, and no pedestrians to break their uniformity. On and on they come in apparently never-ending succession, this car from a fleet of the White Rabbit, that from the Scottish Mobile Unit, that bearing the name of the ‘Laird of So-and-so,’ this ‘The Minnies,’ that ‘The Maudes,’ this an A.S.C. wagon from the Red Hand fleet, that from the fleet of the Black Star, this the gift of the Licensed Traders, that from the Scottish Textile Workers. The Red Cross ambulance cars go to prove we are a united nation.

Had a case of typhoid in one of the wards, so several boys in that particular marquee are to be inoculated. One boy informed me that he didn’t think it would be necessary in his case as it was only six months since he had been tattooed, and tattooing was as good as inoculation, wasn’t it?

Quite a number of the boys hold this belief. This particular one rolled back his sleeve, and showed me a red heart shot through with a large, blue arrow the size of a respectable lead pencil. Underneath were written the words ‘Maggie, I love you.’

Such an unblushing parade of affection persuaded another man to show his arms, the one bearing the name ‘Elsie,’ and the other ‘Agnes,’ a situation which
the other boys thought liable to be fraught with considerable danger. The possibility, however, of rivalry and jealousy was removed, when the man explained that they were the names of his two little daughters.

A woman’s head in a befeathered hat, and a girl’s name, are favoured subjects for tattooing, though the name, one fears, must place a terrible strain on the fidelity – or the veracity – of the gallant and impressionable martyr. A pantomime ‘principal boy’ is another favoured device. So, too, are clasped hands, while a man who has seen service in India quite usually boasts a coiled snake on the arm and a most elaborate blue and red dragon with out-stretched wings unfurled across the chest.

Even yet, I’m not sure whether the following piece of sarcasm heard to-day was intentional or not.

Two boys from the same town were talking of a home regiment.

‘Who is the Medical Officer with the Loamshires now?’

‘Captain Medico.’

‘Medico! I went to school with him. You don’t mean to say he’s a doctor!’

‘Yes, old son – and with the Loamshires.’

AN OPERATION AT AN ARMY VETERINARY CAMP

‘Great Scot! He a doctor! Why, man, he couldn’t hurt a fly!’

We had a thoroughly delightful and enthrallingly interesting lecture to-night when the radiographer explained to us X-rays and the working thereof, and showed us many plates of cases we had nursed. Wish all the lectures were as interesting.

To-day a guard was on duty in a ‘shell-shock’ ward where was a patient who persisted in wanting to get out of bed.

‘Now be quiet, matey,’ he exhorted. ‘You must lie still, lie still, chum. No, you can’t get up. Lie still, I say. If you don’t lie still, I’ll – I’ll –,’ the accents grew positively threatening – ‘I’ll bring the other guard.’

‘
MA CHÉRIE, BE
an angel and do some mess shopping for me this morning, since you are going into town,’ pleads the home sister.

I hesitate, for off-time has been none too generous of late. We are short-staffed and one’s scanty leisure at any time is always pretty fully booked. So I hesitate.

‘It won’t take long.’ – I know it will take all the morning. – ‘Besides, you know the business from A to Z,’ continues the voice of the arch-flatterer. ‘You will enjoy it. It is market day. There is an evacuation, and you’ll get a good car to town. And you’ll help me tremendously.’

When I leave the camp I don’t take ‘a good car.’ It is a glorious, mild, springlike morning – a perfect
morning, thoroughly to be enjoyed after a month’s iron frost of twenty to thirty degrees, a morning when, if I were in mufti, I should feel shabby and go and buy a new hat, and then straightaway order a coat and skirt to correspond with it.

However, the Army, excellent institution that it is, decides our fashions, and on April 1st I shall don a new hat, a straw one, and not until April 1st. Moreover, it is a very dull pastime buying a new hat precisely like its predecessor, so my ebullition of up-liftedness and light-heartedness finds an outlet in another way. Instead of decorously taking ‘a good car,’ I am mounted on a great lumbering motor-lorry, the seat at least six feet above the ground. Here I drink in great draughts of refreshing, sweet, pure air.

The driver and I ‘talk shop,’
his
shop, though ultimately it veers round to mine. After meeting cows, young bullocks, pigs, flocks of sheep, and several of the most antediluvian of country carts, – all quaint enough to form the subject of an exquisite picture, – we encounter a tiny band of Indians with their goats. At this we abandon the subject of self-starters for that of the management of traffic.

‘Of course, traffic is not so well regulated here as it is in England. Still, we have surprisingly few accidents.
During Christmas week, however, I knocked down a man, an A.S.C. bloke.

‘He was admitted into hospital and I went that night to see him. “You fool!” was his greeting. I agreed.

‘“You fool! Here I am being tucked into a cushy bed several times a day by kind-hearted nurses, bless ’em! All we patients are happy as the day is long. Everybody is busy making something to decorate the ward. Look at all the holly and mistletoe the boys are going to hang up. There are going to be concerts and Christmas teas and sing-songs and game competitions, and you, you fool, knock me down – and
don’t hurt me sufficiently
to keep me here. I’m to be discharged to-morrow.”

‘And the poor blighter turned his face to the tent wall.

‘You notice, we’ve got some women-drivers, sister. They’ll be all right for the lighter base work, at E—— and H——, near the coast, but the usual ambulance-car driving is not fit work for a woman, with its night-work, and out in all weathers.

‘You know, too, what it was in July. We had to disinfect and spray our cars several times during the day and night – and our own clothes had to go to the fumigator. Our shirts we had to change more than once during duty. And another thing. As you know,
we sometimes hadn’t a man as a case but, at the end of the journey, a dead body.’

‘True,’ I remark, ‘but not one of your arguments is strong enough to urge against women doing their obvious duty in this ambulance work. What about us nurses? We have night-work, we are out in all weathers in our camp hospitals. We had the vermin nuisance last July, and, indeed, always have it – in a milder form, of course. While as for your last argument …’

‘Yes, sister, but you nurses – well, you are just you.’

Marvelling at the inconsistency of man, I bid him good-morning, and go towards the market, calling to mind the heated opposition we always have from the boys when we sometimes say what we often passionately feel, that we nurses would gladly and proudly go as far up the line as we could be useful, and that it is our duty to take the same risks of being killed, wounded, or maimed as they.

But chivalry, it seems, is not yet dead, and this subject remains the only one on which the boys contradict and oppose us.

What is the first item on my shopping list? Eggs. I go towards the poultry section set apart under the shade
of Ecole des Beaux Arts, and flanked on the further side by a beautiful Gothic archway.

I am offered ‘
beaucoup
eggs,’ as the boys would say, great yellow ones, at thirty centimes each. Why do eggs look so much more tempting when their shells are yellow? Emboldened by the size of my order for eggs, the market woman presses me to buy chickens trussed and ready for the oven at seven, eight, or ten francs. But what interests me more than the prepared fowls are the live ones with legs tied together and put down in odd places, three cockerels, for example, in company with a pair of great wooden sabots thrust into a string bag, which lies in the wide sill of a mullioned window, whose tiny, diamond-shaped panes are throwing back a myriad shafts of lights from the soft, February sunshine.

I pass a booth laden with aluminium rings
faites dans lestranchées
, and ornamented with tiny badges, small designs beaten out of spent cartridges and numerous chasings. Next to it is a stall for those postcards which the boys adore, celluloid masterpieces emblazoned with polychromatic badges and flags, and decorated with a chaste salutation ‘Forget-me-not,’ ‘To memory dear,’ ‘A kiss from France,’ ‘Ever of thee I’m fondly dreaming,’ and so on. It is not at all unusual for
one boy to send as many as four or five of these postcards with its burning message to different, trusting (let us suppose!) damsels in England.

One stall contains biscuits, over a hundred different kinds. Hardly a war-time scarcity, evidently. The numerous refreshment booths have pain d’épice, madeleines, croissants, rolls, different kinds of pastries and brioche. How good is the latter, piping hot, with fresh butter and honey, and to the accompaniment of tea, which the English have now taught the French to make really well.

The delicacies on the booth presumably are chiefly for the indulgence of the market shoppers, not the stallholders. For one notices several of the latter frugally dining on a glass of
vin rouge
made warm with a little hot water and sustaining with an accompaniment of a hunch of dry bread, – quite a different meal to that of the denizens of Covent Garden, with their plate of ‘hot roast,’ their fish and chips, or their pot of tea and bulky sandwiches.

But
l’heure s’avance
and I have only worked one item off my shopping list. Even so my loitering footsteps are waylaid at a china stall, where I buy for half-a-franc each some charmingly quaint, dull-brown casseroles. Thereby do I take time by the forelock, for
such an opportunity as this morning’s may not present itself again before spring comes, and the forest near us is a carpet of flowers, so many of which I shall want to commandeer for our marquees.

Rounding a corner towards the vegetable stall I behold two English Tommies making purchases of fruit. The stallholder is a girl of twenty or so, and she is smiling up at them roguishly as she presses her wares – which I deeply suspect of being somewhat overpriced – upon one of them, with a ‘Oh, aah, m’sieu, mais c’est bon.’

And Tommy, as he ruefully disburses from a tiny belt pocket, is saying, ‘Garn, yer sorsy cat!’

Potatoes at thirty-five centimes the kilo, dessert apples at fifteen centimes, oranges at ten centimes – how much nicer they appear served from the large tub-baskets which remind one of Marseilles! – cabbages at twenty-five centimes, cauliflowers at sixty, conclude my purchase at the greengrocery stall, where I am served by a very small, exceedingly old-fashioned, young person of twelve or thereabouts. She is dressed in a large checked, red and black, bouncing dress, a small checked, blue and white, bouncing apron, a shoulder tippet of black wool crochetted in three tiers, each edged with a scalloped-shell pattern. She has an
exceedingly tight, exceedingly thin pigtail, – the end slightly swollen with a tightly bound barricade of white sewing cotton, – a very quick, disarming smile, and a very quickly upturned nose.

We exchange a wide, friendly smile, hers fading as she turns to seek a new customer, mine fading at Maman’s leisure and typically French disinclination to make out
le facteur.

Finally, she sweeps aside some swedes and carrots and makes a salient on the stall, where she rests her book of bills and aggrievedly writes out my account in thin, spidery characters. Then she takes out a red cardboard
porte billet
, bulging with the greasiest of one, two, five, and twenty franc notes efficiently held in place by a piece of the greasiest string, gives me my change, and we part amid elaborate courtesies.

A scrubbing-brush and some beeswax, – I create much merriment by my confession that I don’t know what to ask for, but my need is
cire des abeilles
, which is immediately understood and translated as
encaustique
, – complete my purchases, and with the ordering of coal and coke my responsibilities cease.

As I write out the
laissez-passer
to admit the coal and the coalheaver into the camp, I inquire the price. ‘One hundred and sixty francs the thousand kilo.’

Six pounds for nine and a half cwt.! What a price! As I leave the office, I conclude that the only comment which meets the situation is the old tag the boys adopt when other words seem superfluous: ‘Sister, I believe there’s a war on.’