The Other Anzacs (25 page)
Among those picked up by one of the French destroyers was Emily Hodges. Though she couldn’t speak French nor the captain English, she recalled his friendliness. ‘He just patted me on the shoulder two or three times during the night and that was all.’
8
On the
Lynn
, a sister described how an officer picked her up in his arms and carried her to his cabin. ‘He put me on his bunk and stripped off my wet clothes, saying: ‘This is no time for mock modesty, you’re done.’ Indeed I didn’t even think of such a thing—and oh the comfort of the warm, dry pyjamas; and the hot coffee and brandy his steward brought me was delicious.’
9
Reaching Salonika and moved to the French hospital ship
Canada
, the survivors were given clothing, hairpins and toothbrushes by the nurses on board. Jeannie Sinclair was handed an overcoat and slippers before she was transferred to the
Grantully Castle
nearby. The ship’s matron was English and the sisters Australian. Edith Wilkin remembered that they ‘simply robbed their wardrobes on our account, and did everything they could to cheer us. They were a splendid band of women.’
10
In a letter she wrote shortly after being taken onto the
Grantully Castle
, Fanny Abbott recounted, ‘I have on baksheesh [Arabic for nothing] underclothes with the exception of slip and slippers from the Red Cross Society. Like a silly, my leg strap I had taken off with stockings now reposes at the bottom of the Gulf of Salonika with many other treasures. Oh it just makes one’s heart break when one thinks of it all. Never mind I suppose I ought to be thankful to be here and alive.’
11
For Fanny, there was also the knowledge that the war had claimed the lives of two of her three brothers in the previous six months.
Salonika was in a state of political upheaval. The survivors were not allowed onto the streets but, according to Ina Coster, ‘some of the doctors took one or two of the girls to a couple of shops, and they got such necessities as hairpins and handkerchiefs’. She added, ‘You keep forgetting that everything is gone, and get many shocks when you realise what it means.’
12
Emily Hodges was among those who went shopping. The first thing she did with the money that was raised for the sisters was to buy a pot of face cream and some face powder. ‘After I had been floating in the sea for eight and a half hours, my face was the colour of mahogany. And I had no hair pins.’
13
Kath King was one of the Australian sisters on board the
Grantully Castle
, and she did what she could for the women. ‘We took on all survivors, at present there are 99 missing out of which are ten sisters, which seems a very large percentage; quite a number are very ill but most are suffering from shock. The Matron [Sister Cameron] is seriously ill, they think pneumonia.’
14
The next morning the sad business of a roll call was made, revealing that 167 people from the
Marquette
had lost their lives, including ten sisters of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service and twenty-two other ranks of the Medical Corps. The nurses who died were Marion Brown, Isabel Clark, Catherine Fox, Mary Gorman, Nona Hildyard, Helena Isdell, Mabel Jamieson, Mary Rae, Lorna Rattray and Margaret Rogers.
Around 27 October a boat was seen floating upside down at the Greek coastal town of Zagora. Towed ashore, it was found to contain the bodies of four men and two women, the only bodies of missing nurses to be recovered. All six wore life belts and were tied to a boat thwart. A British naval commander reported that no identity discs were found, nor papers on the bodies. But one of the women wore a gold watch with ‘Margaret Rodgers [
sic
]’ engraved on it. An Army Nursing Service badge was also recovered. When the commander saw them, the bodies were ‘in a very bad state and were lying in coffins’.
15
The second body was believed to be Helena Isdell. The one presumed to be Margaret Rogers was buried in the Mikra British Cemetery at Salonika with full naval honours. Helena Isdell is remembered along with the eight other nurses lost to the Aegean on the Mikra Memorial within the same cemetery. The memorial commemorates ‘the nurses, officers and men of the forces of the Empire who lost their lives in the Mediterranean and whose only grave is the sea’.
The surviving nurses left on the
Grantully Castle
for Alexandria on 29 October. The journey back was distressing, Poppy Popplewell noted: ‘It’s a sad and sorry feeling to be going back; nothing would matter if all were here; that is the awful part.’ Clad in borrowed Red Cross singlets and khaki woollen golf coats, they managed to laugh and joke about their destitute state, Poppy acknowledging that ‘that part of it matters least after all’. She remembered the precious belongings and personal mementos that lay on the seabed but she realised that ‘grieving over sunken treasures’ made her feel ashamed. Edith Wilkin wrote to her mother of her regret at the loss of her collection of curios, ‘but above all your ring and the wee chain with my tiki’. These were the ‘little things one can never replace’. But they were alive.
On 2 November, New Zealand nurse Fanny Speedy was on duty at the 19th British General Hospital in Alexandria when the badly injured and pneumonia-stricken Marie Cameron and three other survivors were admitted. Mabel Wright had concussion from a fracture to the base of her skull, Susan Nicoll had thrombosis of one leg, and Elizabeth Wilson had dysentery. Fanny noted that they all seemed ‘rather nerve shattered, which is not surprising’.
16
Edith Wilkin and Poppy Popplewell spent time convalescing at a hospital at Luxor, while Mary Christmas and five other survivors were sent to the nurses’ rest home at Aboukir, near Alexandria. As she recovered, Mary wrote to Mary Gorman’s sister. She expressed her own and Jeannie Sinclair’s sorrow, and described how hard the Waimate nurse had worked before she left Alexandria. Sister Sinclair, she said, would never forget her help in the wards.
Marie Cameron was desperately ill. Several of her ribs were broken and one had pierced her lung. She not only had concussion but was paralysed down her right side. She had been taken onto the
Grantully Castle
at Salonika in an invalid’s chair, ‘nursing a teddy bear from which she would not be parted. She did not know any of her friends’, one sister wrote.
17
Among the nurses who met and cared for her in Alexandria was her sister Annie, who was on the nursing staff of No. 1 Australian General Hospital in Cairo. Later awarded the Royal Red Cross, Marie Cameron lived the rest of her life at private hospitals in Sydney and Wagga Wagga, where her family lived. She had to learn to speak again, and to use her left hand. Her nursing career was over, and her fragile health would not recover.
Lottie Le Gallais heard about the disaster when the hospital ship
Maheno
left Southhampton in early November to return to Egypt. There was little detail, and she feared for her friends. When she reached Alexandria, the picture became clearer. Ten of the rescued sisters were waiting for the ship when it berthed. In a letter home, she wrote that Marie Cameron ‘went grey in one night’.
18
New Zealand nurses collected clothing and £100 for the survivors’ immediate needs. A further shock lay in store for Lottie: her friend Sister Ada Hawken, who had asked her to bring some things back from London, had died of typhoid in Alexandria three weeks earlier. ‘That is 11 of the girls of the
Maheno
gone, ’ Lottie wrote in shocked disbelief.
19
A headstone that had just been placed on Ada’s grave stated that she had ‘died for her country’s service’.
In his report on the tragedy, New Zealand Surgeon-Major D.S. Wylie was full of praise for the conduct of the nurses. ‘At no time did I see any signs of panic or any signs of fear on the part of anyone, and I cannot find words adequately to express my appreciation of the magnificent way in which the nurses behaved, not only on the vessel but afterwards in the water. Their behaviour had to be seen to be believed possible.’
20
He attributed the deaths of some of the nurses to the incident in which one lifeboat crashed onto another in the escape from the sinking vessel. Their injuries were such that ‘their subsequent existence in the water [was] impossible’.
21
But how the tragedy had come about remained a mystery.
New Zealanders seethed with indignation when they learned that a German U-boat had torpedoed a ship carrying nurses. Their nurses. Ida Willis, stationed at No. 2 Stationary Hospital at Pont de Koubbeh near Cairo, wrote that the ‘tragic news cast a deep gloom’ over all New Zealand personnel. Olive Haynes, on the nearby island of Lemnos, was shocked when she heard of the deaths. ‘Very bad news from all around. Transport torpedoed not far from here and 12 [
sic
] Sisters out of 40 missing.’
1
To New Zealanders and Australians, the deaths of the ten nurses were linked in heroic sacrifice with the execution of the English nurse Edith Cavell just eleven days earlier. In the propaganda battle, Cavell, who had also tended wounded German soldiers with devoted care, represented all that was good and noble in nursing, while Germany was portrayed as an enemy without morality. Her execution was one of the great German blunders of the war. From November 1914 to July 1915, wounded and derelict English and French soldiers were hidden from the Germans by a French prince at his château near Mons, and then conveyed to the house Cavell and others occupied in Brussels, where they were given money to reach the Dutch border with the help of guides.
On 5 August 1915 the Germans arrested and imprisoned Cavell. She admitted having sheltered and helped to convey to the border about 200 English, French and Belgians. Court-martialled, she and a Frenchman were sentenced to death. The two were shot on 12 October 1915. She faced the firing squad with a dignity that moved the world. To the chaplain who administered the last sacraments, she remarked, ‘Patriotism is not enough.’ The phrase reverberated in the lands of the Allies, not least in Australia and New Zealand.
Soon after a memorial service for Cavell in Melbourne, the
Argus
printed a letter from a New Zealand nurse who had been aboard the
Marquette
when it was torpedoed. It related how the passengers had struggled for life, hanging onto pieces of raft, and said the ‘nurses behaved with grand courage . . . It will be a comfort to the relatives of the nurses in N.Z. to know that they were so splendidly brave and self-sacrificing in the face of death.’
2
In New Zealand, the Christchurch
Star
editorialised on the disaster:
Amid the horrors of war women play a truly heroic part. To their gentle care is confided the wounded soldier, and not thousands but tens of thousands of men have been nursed back to health and strength by the willing hand that serves under the Red Cross. It comes as a great shock, comes in fact with a poignancy nothing can equal, to learn of women who were devoting their skill to the alleviation of pain, and working for the welfare of humanity, being among the victims of war. Against a background of carnage their work, for friend and foe alike, stands noble and inspiring. While men fight one another, women tend the wounded, and there can be no doubt at all but that their’s [
sic
] is the nobler part. Naturally enough the eyes of the world are on the firing line and sometimes the work of the nurses, from the very firing line to the hospitals is overlooked. It was ever thus. Those who scar the tree of life, a great thinker once said, are remembered by the scars, but those who water its roots have nothing by which they may be known. But their’s [
sic
] is the tree.
3
