A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (17 page)

In the wards (tents, of course) everything that will freeze has frozen. The thermometers, customarily standing in a small jar of carbolic solution, are found embedded in a little, icy mass. This thawed, and a few temperatures taken, one tries to chart the same. Then the fountain pen refuses to fount. The ward ink? Frozen, also.

One begins to get ready the dressing trays and lotions. Most of the lotions are frozen. Hence, round the ward fire in the early morning is a somewhat crowded collection. First and foremost all the fire buckets, then numerous big and little lotion bottles, their corks removed, and a piece of gauze over the mouth of the bottle. Then sundry medicine bottles.

Giving the medicines in a ‘line’ consisting, say, of eight marquees is quite a lengthy business. The medicines are primarily all to thaw. Some indeed, the ferri. and amm. cit. for example, are a solid mass, and on more than one occasion the mass has broken the bottle.

Castor oil one finds to be a kind of emulsion, which must also go through a thawing (a slow one, unfortunately), process. The medicine towel is frozen, and one must melt some ice to obtain a little water to wash the glasses.

On trying to make an egg-flip, the eggs are discovered to be frozen, and on going to procure a drink of milk and soda, the milk is found to be solid, and a debris of broken glass, and a straggling little sheet of ice give testimony to what has happened to the soda water bottles.

Then a message comes that the water supply has failed owing to the frost, and that only half a pailful of water per dual marquee is available until the water carts come in three hours’ time.

‘The water for dressings only,’ one reminds the men. That means none for shaving, for washing patients – ‘Faith! It’s too cold to wash,’ says Pat, in true boyish relief – for washing breakfast dishes, for scrubbing, – though truth to tell, the water has sometimes frozen on one end of the table while the other end was being scrubbed, – or any for hot water bottles.

Fortunately, all the hot water bottles are filled with water either in cold liquid, or more frequently in solid form, and they are hung round the stove for the contents to melt before being re-heated.

This morning I encountered one bag which had been knocked out of bed, and the contents were as hard as a brick. The bed patients we keep
deliciously warm with lots of blankets, large bed-socks (as many pairs as desired) and woollen clothes from head to heel, ‘cholera belts,’ nightingales, gloves, balaclavas, anything warm and woolly they care to have.

The up-patients congregate round the stoves, and with the tents laced up and blankets hung over the openings, it is quite an easy matter to keep cosy.

We occasionally laugh at the men dressed
cap-à-pie
in bed, but we nursing sisters are only a degree or two less thorough. Indeed, preparation for bed is a great event.

We all set going our various types of oil-stoves and Tommy’s cookers with water for hot bottles, washing and hot drinks. The bunk is a regular Moab, for we do all our ‘big washes’ at night lacking the courage to do so in the morning. Some mornings we had no wash-water brought us at all, for our supply had frozen, and the choice rested between using that out of our hot water bottles, or waiving the edict of the powers that be forbidding the use of powder, and just indulging in the advice of beauty-specialists, and giving oneself a good ‘dry-clean.’

The ‘big wash’ over, one brews the hot drink – tea,
café noir, café au lait or chocolat, or, perhaps, a glass of vin rouge made hot, and served with a little sugar and a slice of lemon, vin rouge at un-franc-dix the three gill bottle and forty centimes back on the return of the bottle!

Then one caresses and anoints one’s chilblains on toes, heels, fingers, and ears, rubs glycerine and red lotion into one’s cracked chaps, face cream on one’s frost-bitten face, and glycerine on one’s cracking lips, dons pyjamas, nightdress, bed jacket, bed socks, bed stockings, piles on the bed dressing-gown, travelling rug, and fur coat, tries to read in bed, and finds it too cold to have one’s hands from under the bedclothes, thinks of the home folks, to whom one ought to have written, and of the five minutes sewing one ought to have done, decides it is much too cold for any of them, turns out the light, and cuddles down, hoping that one may go to sleep and remain asleep until ‘reveille’ without the necessity of having to sit up in bed and massage numb feet or knees, or without having to get up to do physical exercise of the On-your-toes-rise-lower-rise-lower variety.

Besides, one must remember, this is the better weather for the men in the trenches, and so long
as we have this hard, dry cold, we don’t have those poor, dreadful, blue, purple-black, swollen trench feet among our cases.

IT SOUNDS SOMEWHAT
Irish in the saying, but it is none the less true that the best part of the day is the night.

After mess dinner at eight, the day nursing staff is free until 7.30 next morning, so it is then that we do our ‘entertaining.’ This consists of going to one another’s bunks or bell tents, and having coffee and biscuits and fruit and chocolate – and conversation.

The hostess usually receives us in bed, which is wisdom on her part, for she is out of the way, and that is an important factor in an area where even inches count. The ‘guests’ are customarily in dressing-gowns, garments which are as varied as the costumes at a fancy dress ball, and which hail from the sphere of
our fighting grounds. There are dressing robes bought in Valetta, burnouses picked up in bazaars at ‘Alex,’ checked
matinées
from
les galleries
in the nearest provincial French town, little turned up slippers from Salonica, boudoir mules bought in Paris and jeered at because they are not of O.A.S. stability, comfortable stodgy English slippers knitted by comfortable stodgy English aunts, and utilitarian ‘slip-ons’ hailing from Oxford Street.

‘O.A.S.’ is responsible for some dreadful lapses and some fearful makeshifts. Our meals and our crockery are most unconventional. To-night we drank black coffee from the cup-screw of a vacuum flask, the cup-casing of a spirit flask, a medicine glass, a marmalade jar, a ‘real china’ cup, and a piece of porcelain which in peace days was used to contain face powder, and which was accepted with the remark ‘To what base uses …’ We hadn’t a spoon, only a silver button hook. We ate biscuits from the tin. We ate sugared strawberries, – delicious little wild ones, – with a pair of scissors.

We talk as gourmets of the food we eat, and discuss the ‘cakes from home,’ dilating on the excellence of the cook, whether she be fat, autocratic, and of long domestic standing, or whether she be a young sister
just rawly recruited from a domestic science school. Our tastes, too, are catholic.

We partook heartily one night of lobster, cheese biscuits, black coffee, ‘plum cake’ from the canteen, and slept just as heartily, and next day laughed equally heartily at the rueful dismay of an old dug-out of our acquaintance, who envied our digestion and rosy cheeks.

Of course, like all nursing and medical people we ‘talk shop.’ One asks the sister from the recovery hut how the boy is progressing she sent for operation, and one of the theatre sisters answers X’s inquiry about her trephine case, and Y’s question about her amputation case, and we grow keenly interested in descriptions of others, until the girl who sleeps next to the theatre-sister with only a partition between them vows she trembles with fear at the possibility of the said sister coming over in her sleep with a penknife as scalpel and curling tongs as artery forceps.

The smile she raises is well timed, for the conversation has taken on a tragic tone. The sister from the recovery hut has told how one patient on the dangerously-ill list did not want her to write to his wife ‘because there is a new baby coming this week,’ of how word has come through from home that ‘little
sonny’s’ mother is dead, and he must not be told yet, and of how another boy – only nineteen – had opened dying eyes to see some flowers she had taken into the ward, and how pleased he had been for it reminded him of the garden at home. We sit on the floor of the bell tent and gaze out into the night, a night when the sound of the guns is insistent. Our eyes seek the horizon, and we suddenly feel a helpless band of futile women, agonisingly impotent.

‘Well, I must go, and thanks for your cold coffee,’ the theatre-sister remarks. Her little piece of
naïveté
dispels our feeling of sadness. One’s moods occur in patches on active service.

Only one night in several months have we had an enemy aircraft alarm. We had brushed our hair convivially, and the early birds had retired to rest when we heard the ‘Stand to’ bugle sounded, followed by ‘Lights out’ and ‘Fall in at the double.’ Racing cars, and the sound of many marching feet were the next sounds, and then came a message that each nursing sister had to go to her post, for ours is a tent hospital, and a marquee burns in three minutes, – which is not a great deal of time in which to remove helpless patients.

The first remark would have delighted the cynic. ‘What shall we wear?’ called one girl from the
darkness, the seeming frivolity of the question being set aside when she wondered if, from force of habit, she should go in ward uniform with its preponderance of white, or in dark coat and hat. The next remark got a laugh, and cries of ‘Good old Scotty,’ for it was ‘I’m going to take my money, in case the hut gets hit.’

In a very few minutes we, our identity and burial discs accompanying, were at the doors of the wards, not entering in case of waking the patients, but gazing expectantly up into the sky, and trying to feel as thrilled and frightened as we ought to have been.

But the aircraft was beaten back, and all we suffered was the loss of an hour’s sleep, and a little unnecessary preparation on the following nights of placing in readiness gum boots and thick coats.

I DREADED THE
very thought of night duty with its tense anxieties, its straining vigilance, its many sorrows. Still I had come to France to ‘do my bit,’ and that bit for two months meant night work. On active service, too, one quickly becomes inured to doing many things one dislikes and detests; any one with the slightest particle of unselfishness could not fail to become otherwise.

‘Half-past six, sister’; the batman clumps along the corridor of the hut in stalwart army boots, making enough noise to wake the Seven Sleepers, and night nurses are far from being in the same category as those enviable beings. Half-past six, dinner at quarter-past seven, twenty-five minutes in which to lie persuading one’s self to get up before the reluctant dive from bed
must be made. It is at first strange to go on awaking to a meal of roast beef and boiled turnips, etc., in place of the bacon and eggs to which we have for years been accustomed. Still we are adaptable people, and one must eat to live as strenuously as we do.

NIGHT DUTY, 2 A.M.

We each take our lighted lantern as we leave the mess, and trudge down to the many rows of long tents whitely glistening under the streaming light of a brilliant moon. A dear old major of the old school meets us and bids us ‘good-night,’ addressing us as ‘My Lady of the Lamp.’ One of the band, however, very much of the new school, thinks ‘the Hurricane Girls’ would be a better title for us, and suggests we could become a passable item in a modern revue – song and chorus, the final effect being to black out the stage for a ‘lamp dance.’

The weather is a very important factor during night duty in a camp hospital. Each nurse has four to – well,
‘x’
– number of tents allotted to her, the number depending on her status and on the division, the medical division having a larger number to each nurse than the heavier surgical division. The nurse passes from tent to tent very many times during the night, her work alternating severally from indoor to outdoor, while the distance she covers is quite surprising. One,
gifted with a healthy curiosity, attached a pedometer and found she had walked a little over sixteen miles in the night.

Pathways have been made and planks laid down between each marquee, but French mud would defy Macadam’s very ghost. We have had nights when wind and rain have raged and lashed, when our hurricanes have blown out directly we have lifted the tent flaps to go out, when we have been splashed to the knees with mud, when even our elastic-strapped sou’westers have blown off, when the rain has stung our cheeks like whipcord until finally with the desperation, the resource, the delightful disregard for personal appearance common to O.A.S. conditions, and owing to the urgency of our need, we have made of our skirts a pair of trousers by pinning down the middle, have stuffed the end of these ‘garments’ into the tops of our gum boots, tied on our sou’westers with a bandage, and then – got along much more quickly, of course.

The resource and ingenuity of one sister who nursed infectious cases in a camp of small marquees situated in what had once been an orchard, and who to meet the exigencies of her somewhat amphibious work, had a wet-and-wintry-weather skirt made from a groundsheet, could not be adequately acclaimed.