The Other Anzacs (11 page)
Daisy Richmond arrived on the hospital ship
Neuralia
just as Kath was leaving Lemnos. Her news from Gallipoli was depressing. ‘We hear our men are driven back almost to the shore and that the waters of the Dardanelles are so unsafe that only trawlers take the troops up and the wounded back here for no big craft are safe.’
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The
Neuralia
took more than 700 wounded on board, Daisy working feverishly as they sailed to Malta.
The return to Alexandria gave Kath a day off duty. She caught up with two Australian soldiers who were recuperating from their injuries. They were on crutches; one had been thrown from his horse and the other shot through the knee, and both looked ‘pretty pale’. They took Kath to see a friend who had been shot and lost the use of his left arm. Kath thought he seemed ‘a little queer, quite upset me’, but she believed he would recover.
The wounded men cared for by nurses on hospital ships were the fortunate ones. The writer Ion Idriess, a member of the 5th Light Horse, himself wounded, watched as doctors and male orderlies dressed wounds all day aboard the auxiliary hospital ship
Franconia
. Without the advantage of nursing training, many of the orderlies appeared ‘quite incapable of doing up a simple bandage’. Idriess was unimpressed by what he saw. ‘An assistant took the bandage off my leg and then started to pick hairs and fluff from the inflamed wound with a squat thumb-nail under which the dirt was thick.’
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While Kath King was trying to make the best of worrying news about wounded friends, the news for other nurses was even worse. Sister Hilda Samsing was told that one of her and Alice Kitchen’s friends, Colonel Robert Gartside, had been killed, along with General Bridges, the Australian Army’s most senior soldier. One by one their ‘soldier friends’ were dying. Alice Ross King also heard that General Bridges had died. ‘He was shot through the femoral artery and they were going to amputate the leg but he begged to be left until morning. In the night he haemorrhaged and died at Alexandria.’
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The death of soldiers in hospital was now all too common. Some cases touched the nurses more than others, as Elsie Eglinton found at her Alexandria hospital. ‘I lost one dear boy last week who had been shot through the lung, ’ she wrote in her diary of Reginald Kavanaugh, aged twenty-four, a private in the 6th Infantry Battalion.
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He was from the Shepparton area in northern Victoria, and Elsie knew a good many of his friends, ‘so he used to cling to me and being the only Australian nurse in the ward too made him depend on me more’.
This poor boy knew at 2 o’clock that he was dying so he got the doctor to help him make his will, then he said, ‘Now I must live ’til 8 o’clock to say goodbye to the night sister.’ Doctor told me that the poor boy fought very hard to keep alive till I came on duty. Doctor said that he would have sent for me had he known just where to find me. When I went on duty the sister in charge hurried me to his bed. I shall always remember his dear bright face as he clasped my hand and said ‘Goodbye, ’ he only lived about ¼ hour after and I stayed beside him. The English sisters waited in the ward to give me any orders for the night. That is the sort of thing that wears us out, not the hard work.
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Elsie wrote to the boy’s mother to tell her about his illness and death, lamenting that while it would be best if the ‘office people’ wrote, ‘they don’t know all particulars and that’s not much comfort to a poor mother’.
In
theatre at the Heliopolis Palace hospital in Cairo, Alice Ross King was critical of many aspects of the treatment of the wounded. She thought some surgeons were incompetent, including one who let ‘the patients haemorrhage far too much and has already lost a few cases that should have been saved’. And conditions in the theatre were frightful. The heat was getting worse, making life more difficult. Conditions were oppressive and ‘almost unbearable’ during operations. ‘One leg and one arm amputated and 15 other operations. The leg and arm were both very offensive and the heat overpowering, ’ Alice wrote.
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The stories coming back to the hospital wards painted scenes of hell. ‘One boy was wounded on Sunday and lay on the battlefield until Wednesday among the dead before being picked up. They saw Turks come round and kill wounded.’ One story that Alice heard concerned an officer who ‘went mad with the horrors of it all’ in the trenches. ‘He jumped up shouting and immediately was killed by the Turks.’
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Alice got word from an officer that Frank Smith was alive, but that seventeen out of thirty-two officers of the battalion were dead, wounded or missing. Perhaps she was yearning for Frank, but he was not the sole focus of her attention. Helping to keep her sane amid the mad turmoil and the heat were her ‘little minutes with X at the end of the day . . . We sit on the roof under the great big stars in the lovely cool night. He is a dear restful middle aged thing and I think I can trust him.’
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X was not her only rooftop friend. Captain Arthur Logan, a New Zealand dental surgeon, was another. Alice met him when he extracted a tooth stump that was giving her a dreadful time. ‘It hurt me very much and I felt very sick. Capt. L. seems a nice boy. I have promised to see him on the roof tomorrow.’
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Despite no sleep and a busy day in theatre, the meeting went ahead, allowing Alice to form some impressions even though she was ‘too sick to notice him much’. The captain was thirty but looked much younger and was ‘not bad looking—with rather a sensitive face’. He had ‘peculiar’ eyes and a slight limp. ‘Anyhow I feel drawn to him and I think we shall be good chums. He looks a clean man.’
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Despite lingering pain in her throat, mouth and jaw, Alice met the captain in the moonlight on a little balcony off the dentistry rooms. A cool breeze was blowing, and they spent time looking at photos. They ‘came to a pretty fair understanding’. ‘He pretends to be really in love and talks of forever and all that. But we are only to be chums and if he worries me or gets too loving I’m going to
imshi
.’
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In the Anzac vernacular, picked up from the Egyptians, Alice was saying she would leave very quickly. A letter from Frank Smith arrived. He had been slightly wounded in action, but it was his tone that worried Alice. ‘It is a peculiar letter and I can’t quite catch the spirit of it. He is evidently not trusting me. But he was always changeable and a bit suspicious.’
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If Alice was worried, so too was Elsie Cook. Her time with Syd was coming to an end. He had spent several days recuperating at the Beau Rivage, enjoying the beachfront, the open-air dining room and manicured gardens. Elsie was given a rare day off, and they ‘donned swimming suits and went in for a surf ’ in the Mediterranean. In a reminder of days gone by in Sydney, they relaxed on the beach. ‘Simply delicious to laze out in the sun on the sands and dreamily gaze at the beautiful blueness of sky and sea. So utterly luminous and restful after the last few stressful weeks.’
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Then came the 19th, a day Elsie always remembered, as it was the day on which she and Syd had married. ‘As it is the 19th, we knew something would happen. A telephone message came for Syd to return to the Dardanelles tomorrow.’
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His departure left Elsie feeling ‘miserable, dull and desolate’. It would be another three months before she saw him again—and in very different circumstances.
By mid-May some medical officers at Gallipoli had seen enough of the slaughter to conclude that the Anzacs were in a fight they could not win. This was not the message wanted by the public in Australia or New Zealand, even after the first Gallipoli casualty lists were published in May 1915. People were stunned. No one wanted to believe the numbers of dead and wounded were so high. No one had expected that the fight against the Turks would go so disastrously, nor last so long that it could not be won. But at Gallipoli, Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Percival Fenwick of the New Zealand Medical Corps saw the disaster at first hand. He expressed his anger and frustration in his diary.
Practically we are like a rat in a trap. The rat cannot get out and the owner of the trap does not like putting his hand in, and can only annoy the rat by pushing things through the bars. Unquestionably we are held up. What good we are doing I can’t say; perhaps the War Office can, but N.Z. is losing good men for some reason or other. A friend put it tersely, ‘It’s a bally failure but we can’t chuck it.’ This is the true solution.
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Fenwick would soon regard the continuing conflict as ‘murder and nothing else’ as it lapsed into stalemate. The sound of gunfire and exploding shells never seemed to let up as casualties escalated. Anchored off Gaba Tepe, the flow of wounded to the
Sicilia
seemed a mere prelude to more deaths. To Kath King, the scale of the casualties was almost overwhelming. She took ‘crowds of wounded’ Australians on board after they won, and then lost, two Turkish trenches. Many of the men were seriously wounded. The tide of wounded did not lessen for several days.
Among the endless convoys of the wounded coming on board, some stood out for her. ‘I got such a nice boy in haemorrhaging and was taken to theatre, operated on, returned to ward with my hat pin through his neck, ’ Kath wrote, adding that he ‘died suddenly in about half an hour after returning to ward’. (It could be speculated that the hat pin was used to staunch bleeding.) The ward was frightful, with patients ‘dying almost as quickly as they are admitted’.
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The high death rate took an emotional and physical toll on Kath. ‘Have about six patients dying in my ward, it is dreadful, I get very tired and am very worried about them, ’ she wrote just a week later as the
Sicilia
prepared to take the wounded to Malta.
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Whether on a hospital ship or at a hospital in Egypt, the numbers and plight of the injured were depressing. In Alexandria, Elsie Cook’s ward at the British 17th General Hospital was in pandemonium when she returned to duty after a horse ride along the beach. ‘Several new and very badly wounded men in while I was away—one, a New Zealander, with shocking abdominal wound, already looks like death.’
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Despite the wretchedness she had to contend with, Elsie soon developed a proprietorial liking for her ward. It was her territory.
Her rides provided a brief release from the awful sadness. She often rode with the hospital’s senior surgeon, Captain Bourne, galloping along the wet sandy foreshore of the Mediterranean ‘with pebbles flying and water splashing’, exploring inlets and sightseeing ‘around those beautiful blue bays with a brown, heather and gorse covered sloping shore’. On occasion, they struck out into the desert, finding beautiful palm gardens replete with camels and buffalo. Riding across the desert and through the groves, she found ‘the desert wonderfully soft in the white moonlight’. The rides were not without incident, however. On a hot day in mid-June, Elsie and Captain Bourne took the usual route, passing through the estate of the ex-Khedive, the former ruler of Egypt. But this time they ran into ‘an antagonistic reception’. Egyptian keepers and gardeners shrieked curses at them, chasing and hunting them wildly along the garden paths.
We rode helter skelter into a stable, thought it a means of exit and this caused a great stampede amongst the Arab horses and stable bays. On we went, galloping along, they tried to catch our bridles, one threw his fez into Mr Bourne’s face, another levelled an antiquated rusty looking gun at us, which gave me an uncomfortable cold shiver down my spine—dogs barking, children yelling—awful din and panic. At last we escaped out a side gate and didn’t stop ’til we got far away, then laughed heartily over our wild escapade.
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