The Other Anzacs (21 page)

We are all still swatting flies Mum, they are fearful nothing can be left uncovered it is quite common to see each sister with her left hand over her tea cup, we do not indulge in saucers, if flies do get in the tea we fish them out and swallow the tea to get in first, fancy doing that at home we’d feel sick for a day but I’ll not be fussy after this.
¹¹

Tev explained that sleeping out became impossible as summer gave way to the chill of autumn. The wind was blowing solidly.‘Tent life is very airy for me, a wonder they do not blow down some days or nights. I often have to crawl out and fix the flaps, then it is I long for “my little gray [
sic
] home in the West” I can tell you. Still it is all in the game and everyone seems happy.’ Nell Pike was. When Colonel Fiaschi asked how she liked serving on Lemnos, she replied that it was ‘fun’. This surprised him. ‘But I meant it. We Australian nurses were very patriotic and anything we were doing we were doing for England. We were all glad to be taking part in the “great adventure”.’
¹²

Others, however, soon became less sanguine as winter neared and the weather turned bitterly cold. Dust and flies, mud and wind tested the sisters’ sense of humour. When it rained the clayey soil became a quagmire. They were issued with heavy Tommy boots. Hospital tents blew down in high winds as the pegs failed to keep them anchored. There was no kerosene for heating. Some of the nurses, Olive observed, ‘are fed up already with this place’.

Tev felt much the same, writing to her mother that ‘any old place will do me after this . . . We are being supplied with riding pants, tunics and gum boots. Golly! Won’t we look tragic? I can see our photos in
Table Talk
, “Australian nurses at Lemnos”. You wouldn’t recognise me. I have become so fat, really my rotundity is quite embarrassing, nearly all the girls are the same.’
¹³
In October, the Red Cross delivered some tinned rabbit, but mostly Tev and her colleagues ate bully beef, biscuits and tinned carrots. The taste was vile.

Then there’s some chewed up looking stuff called concentrated vegetables, it’s a little of everything and highly seasoned, the smell gives one indigestion. The people who can foods etc must be making money out of this war, for it’s the greatest rubbish, we existed on bully beef and biscuits for a while, the latter were like plaster of Paris, honestly you have to bang them on the table to break them and then they don’t always break, you gnaw small pieces off the corners, girls were breaking their teeth wholesale. On the Peninsula the boys grind them with stones and make porridge of them. I’m as fat as an ox and yet I can do nothing but discuss food in my letters.
¹⁴

Because of the lack of fresh vegetables, the sisters had to drink lime juice to prevent scurvy. With eggs, meat and potatoes in short supply, Nell Pike was surprised one day when her senior orderly beckoned her outside the tent and cautiously passed her a soiled parcel of sacking with blood seeping from it. Inside was a large cut of steak, which the orderly had ‘taken’ from the British ship SS
Aragon
, anchored in the bay where, to the disgust of soldiers on shore, supercilious English officers lived in indecent luxury in a virtual floating hotel that was reputedly costing £15, 000 a month.
¹⁵
Troops would later joke that the
Aragon
was stranded on its own bottles in Mudros harbour. Thirty-nine-year-old Anne Donnell, at No. 3 hospital, was under no illusions about life on the neglected island.

To-day in the lines I passed a dear little dog, stopped to make a great fuss of him, then it suddenly dawned on me what a changed life we are living, and growing accustomed to. No little children to love, no trees, no flowers, no pets, no shops, nothing dainty or nice, practically no fruit or vegetable, butter and eggs once in a month, twice at most. Please don’t infer from this that I am complaining, far from it, and we have so much to be thankful for, but how we wish that we could give our serious cases the very best of food and delicacies. Of course it’s only natural that we should wish, for our health’s sake, to have some nourishing food. I do have it though in my dreams at night when I visit the most beautiful fruit gardens and pick the sweetest flowers while little children play around; don’t smile, for it’s quite true. It reminds me of these words:
I slept and dreamt that life was beauty
I woke and found that life was duty.
¹⁶

The Australian sisters were the most poorly paid of the nurses on Lemnos, and this made it more difficult for them to supplement their food from canteens and hawkers. Olive Haynes fantasised about what she would most like when she returned home. ‘I want a nice soft bed with sheets, a hot bath, hot buttered toast, tea with not condensed milk. You must have plenty of strawberry jam and cake ready.’ If any of the men grumbled about their food or conditions, she noted, their comrades would chafe them by suggesting they would be ‘wanting flowers on your grave next’.
¹⁷

If the conditions were harsh on Lemnos, the chauvinism of military officers did nothing to lighten them. The presence of women within sound of the guns at the Dardanelles was an affront to some officers, who argued that male orderlies would do just as well as the nurses this close to the front. Such attitudes, said Sister Nellie Morrice, made the nurses’ work an uphill battle.

I have known the officers in charge of the ward to come in and fire an order direct to the orderly in front of a sister. At times our presence was ignored by the officer, with the result that we had very little control over the orderlies, the officer seemed to want the orderly to know that they were quite satisfied with the work the orderlies were doing and that sisters were quite unnecessary.
¹⁸

The patients, she noted, ‘thought otherwise’.

Colonel Fiaschi in particular was seen as antagonistic towards the presence of women. Grace Wilson was no fan of Fiaschi. ‘The colonel is a very hard man—declares the sisters are all too soft, and to my astonishment, announced that he fully expected half of them and almost half of the Officers to die—he has no consideration whatever for his personnel.’
¹⁹
However, others, such as Anne Donnell, admired his ‘strong personality’ after he fell ill with beriberi, caused by vitamin deficiency. He sought no special favours, according to Anne, ‘roughing it equally with the men, sleeping between coarse blankets, with no pillowslip on the hard pillow’. Ill as he was, he continued to take a cold dip in the sea at dawn each day until his condition deteriorated so badly he had to be stretchered on to a hospital ship.

Shortly afterwards, Lieutenant General R.H.J. ‘Bertie’ Fetherston, the Director-General of Australian Army Medical Services, made a tour of inspection on Lemnos. He did not like what he saw. Unlike Fiaschi, Fetherston thought that all sisters should be on an equal basis with the officers. In conversation with Anne Donnell, he said he was ‘not too pleased with the accommodation and comfort of our nurses generally out here’. Married to a nurse in Melbourne, Bertie Fetherston was well placed to understand the needs of nurses.

Fetherston was unhappy with the hospital tents and marquees he saw on such a barren and windswept island. He said the nurses had endured especially tough conditions, living in tents, eating little more than service rations, with no baths or bathing facilities, and poor sanitary conditions. It had been a mistake in the first place, he added, ‘that the camping ground used by the native Egyptian labourers on the Island should have been used as a hospital site’.
²⁰
Fetherston insisted that the nurses be provided with huts, warm clothing and better mess and bathing arrangements. He lauded Grace Wilson’s work, control and leadership. ‘The matron of this hospital deserves the highest praise and commendation, and under her the whole nursing staff have done wonderfully fine work, ’ he wrote. While not expecting elaborate food for active service or at the front, ‘when hospitals are established and female nurses sent, it is expected that reasonable good food will be available’.
²¹

Fetherston was so appalled that he said no more Australian nurses should be employed on Lemnos until conditions there improved.
²²

But by 30 November the nurses were still housed in unlined bell tents and warm winter uniforms were still to arrive. They tried unsuccessfully to keep warm with their own clothes. ‘We all suffered terribly with the cold, and with all our warm clothing we couldn’t get warm day or night, ’ Anne Donnell complained. ‘Personally, I shivered for three nights without sleep; I have chilblains and my two small toes are frostbitten—agony.’
²³
She empathised with the Anzacs on the Peninsula, hearing stories from her patients of men who had drowned because their feet were so paralysed with cold that they could not crawl away to safety in time. Sentries were found dead at their posts, frozen and still clutching their rifles. Many who managed to keep their blood circulating by moving about ‘could only grin at the Turks because their fingers were too frozen to pull the trigger’. Some in the hospital were losing both feet, some both hands. ‘It’s all too sad for words, hopelessly sad.’
²⁴

Fetherston was also alarmed by the use of ‘black ships’ staffed by nurses to take invalid soldiers to Egypt, Malta or England. This was wrong, he said, given that submarines could attack them at any time. Fetherston concluded damningly that those in command at Lemnos had ‘not risen to the occasion’. With the decision in December to evacuate all troops from the Dardanelles and admit that the Gallipoli campaign had been a failure, Fetherston’s recommendations for reform came too late.

The sisters celebrated Christmas on Lemnos, with turkey and champagne, thanks to some visiting sailors. But Olive Haynes noted, ‘We have lived so plainly for so long that we couldn’t eat half as much as we thought we could— it was too much for us.’ The Turks had an extra Christmas present for them too, an aeroplane dropping three bombs. A relieved Olive wrote, ‘missed us’.

In mid-January 1916, the sisters boarded the hospital ship
Oxfordshire
for Egypt. The nurses were thankful they were not spending the rest of the winter on Lemnos. The night after they boarded the ship a gale blew, and by morning no tent was left standing. As they sailed to Cairo, Tev Davies was struck by the contrast with conditions on the island. Not only was the ship food good, but there was fine china, good cutlery and table linen. ‘It will spoil us for rough living once more but we’ll settle down I suppose if necessary, anyhow we can’t have worse times than we had for first two months on Lemnos. Still I never regret going there.’
²⁵
Olive Haynes also had to pinch herself.

I have a cabin to myself and the stewardess brings us hot water and fills our bags and the meals are very fine, especially after Lemnos. We (the wild Australians) have all our meals together and the English in another saloon. We have to keep reminding each other that there are salt-spoons and we needn’t use our knives for mustard, and that there are plenty of spoons, not to dip the soup spoon into the sugar, and above all not to over-eat.
²⁶

Anne Donnell was reflective.

We have just seen the last of Lemnos. Of course we are glad, yet there are many things we will miss; the unconventional freedom and the unique experiences we had there. Good-bye Lemnos. We take away many happy memories of you. I would not have liked to miss you, yet I have no desire to see you again.
²⁷

Over the previous five months, the Australians had treated thousands of patients, with a death rate of just two and a half per cent. In his official history of Australian medical services in the war, Colonel Arthur Butler dismissed any criticism of the nurses. He said that at No. 3 General Hospital, ‘it was found that the trained female nurses brought order out of chaos in a way that would have been possible to male orderlies only after long training in “Regular” Army service.’

The Honorary Assistant Surgeon at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Major John Morton, who was on Lemnos, paid tribute to the nurses’ work. ‘They did splendid service, and have established themselves as a necessary factor in military organisation. I feel sure that no one who had experienced what the nurses meant to the sick at Lemnos could again tolerate the system of nursing by orderlies.’
²⁸

The experience bred a strong camaraderie among the sisters, and their achievements were recognised by officers who had worked with them. Anne Donnell recounted a conversation with ‘one top-notch’ medical officer nursed on Lemnos who reputedly had told a fellow staff member that ‘If No. 3 [hospital] sisters came within coo-ee of them, the No. 1 sisters would have to look to their laurels . . . We were envied, I think, for roughing it as we did. We have many smiles over our experiences now, and when we first came to Cairo we were known as “those shabby sisters with the bright colour”.’
²⁹

Their work had been anything but ‘shabby’, and if there was one person most responsible for this, it was their Matron, Grace Wilson. As one sister put it, ‘At times I think we could not have carried on without her. She was not only a capable Matron, but what is more a women of understanding. She saw and understood many things without having to be told—and she was very human too’.
³⁰
Bertie Fetherston had no doubt about the role she had played. She was, he said, ‘the best of all our Matrons’. But for the nurses led by her, the hospital would have collapsed. Like so much of the Gallipoli campaign, the planning at Lemnos had failed the very people who were needed to keep it going.