The Other Anzacs (38 page)
In April 1917, the Allies opened their long-planned spring offensive. Easter Monday, 9 April, brought the battle of Vimy Ridge, about eight kilometres north of Arras. The Germans had held the heights there since the trench lines settled in late 1914. The Canadian attack went well, securing the first unequivocal success gained by Allied forces since trench warfare began. Not only did the attack gain the commanding position on the heights but it also drew German reserves away from a planned French offensive on the Aisne River a week later. Victorian Sister Valerie Woinarski was sent to a British casualty clearing station just before Vimy Ridge was taken:
The station consisted simply of a tin shed, with rows of wooden trestles on which the wounded men were laid as they were brought in from the trenches. We had no beds for them, and we simply tucked them up with blankets and hot water bottles while we dressed their wounds, and did all we could for them. Then if they were fit to travel they were put into the hospital train and sent down to the base. We had to work by the light of hurricane lamps, and when the air raids started, even these had to be put out.
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When Vimy Ridge fell, No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital admitted 1000 stretcher cases to its grounds in a single morning. Here the patients were examined and labelled, and their dressings were replaced. They were then fed and sent to base hospitals, the moribund and urgent operation cases staying behind. A New Zealand medical team, including Ida Willis, was assigned to join one of eight British teams helping a British unit with the battle casualties. ‘It was a great grief to the New Zealand team, ’ Ida Willis lamented, ‘to see the poor nursing of the serious abdominal cases, and we tried when possible to slip into the wards to offer assistance.’
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English sisters, Ida Willis, noted, were used only to supervising and ‘made no attempt to nurse the patients themselves as we New Zealand Sisters did’. The war had shown that Australian and New Zealand nurses were better trained and more practical than their British counterparts.
As the spring offensive continued, Elsie Tranter was on theatre duty at No. 26 General Hospital, and worked most days from early morning until late at night, sometimes into the next day. She and another sister took it night about for frequent emergency calls, almost invariably for haemorrhages. It was not unusual for her to assist at ten amputations, one after another. ‘It is frightfully nerve-racking work. I seem to hear that wretched saw at work whenever I try to sleep.’
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On the morning of 5 May Elsie noted that the hospital had ‘quite a little excitement . . . A German aeroplane passed over us. The anti aircraft guns (Archies) got busy. One bomb was dropped but no damage done. This is the first time I have seen shrapnel bursting in the air.’
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A week later another German plane attacked, and shrapnel fell on the hospital. ‘Six of our planes chased the intruder and brought it down the other side of the village.’
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She had care of several young boys—‘baby soldiers’. There was Jock Brise, with his right arm gone and his chest badly lacerated. ‘He looks such a wee boy and when I ask him what is keeping him awake he tells he me he is a “wee bit too tired to sleep”.’
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Baby No. 2 was ‘a little scrap of a boy named Hancock’ with a bad abdominal wound. He did not look a day over fourteen, and got the men to give him their cigarette cards.
Baby No. 3 was a Staffordshire lad named Dart with a tremendous wound in his back. When this had to be dressed, a corporal held him up in his arms. ‘The poor little chap cries piteously when we go to do him.’ One night in his sleep he called out, ‘Come out of that dugout, you chaps—there ain’t no souvenirs there.’ Baby No. 4 was O’Donnell, nicknamed the Sparrow on account of his size—or lack of it. He had an abdominal wound and a ruptured bladder. ‘When I am ready to syringe his wound in the night I have to wake him right up first so I flick his nose with my finger, then pop a lolly in his mouth. He is quite used to this now and as soon as I waken him he doesn’t bother to open his eyes but opens his mouth instead.’ The boys did not stay long at the hospital. As soon as they were fit they were evacuated to Blighty to make room for others. ‘Poor boys, it must be just awful in the trenches in this cold weather. We find it trying enough and yet we live in luxury compared to the boys.’
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Anzacs were among the injured Elsie cared for. One of them was Private Edward Mullard, a twenty-one-year-old from Sydney, who was wounded in both hands and had some fingers amputated. He was also wounded in his buttocks and right foot; his left leg had gone. ‘He is getting on well now but suffers a good deal and sometimes I find him biting hard into his blankets to keep him from calling out. Lots of them are minus an arm or a leg but after they have been in for a day or so and get a little rest from pain they are just full of fun and nonsense.’
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Where the earth remained untouched by war, spring was managing to provide ‘a feast of beauty’, with flowers blooming, restoring the spirit of the sisters and the wounded. Elsie was entranced. ‘Never have I seen such gorgeous tulips [of] all shades, brown, gold, red and such perfect blooms.’ Far out to sea, the brown sails of the fishing fleet were set against a clear blue sky. ‘It is refreshingly beautiful. If only we could carry the calm of those few moments through the turmoil of the long days and wearying nights—if— but we don’t.’
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Over one four-day period in May 1917, Elsie Tranter’s workload was extraordinary: on the first day she assisted at twenty-three operations and went off duty at 1:30 a.m.; the next day she assisted at twenty-two operations and finished at 2 a.m.; on the third day she assisted at eighteen operations and finished at midnight; and on the fourth day she assisted at twenty operations and clocked off at 1 a.m. Such long hours inevitably brought tension and frayed tempers. Working with English doctors did not improve matters for Elsie. One English surgeon, a Captain Grieves, she disliked intensely.
He hates the Aussie boys as much as I hate him. Last night I lost what little respect for him that I had. It was not much to lose. I had been on duty from early morning and this particular operation was the 24th I had assisted at for the day and the day before I had done 15 hours theatre duty. Capt. Grieves knocked down some forceps—muttered something at me. I didn’t hear so he swore at me, swore at the unconscious patient and at the orderlies. Our Aussie boys whom he so despises may be able to hold the premier position anywhere for their extensive and illustrative vocabulary—but the roughest of them keep within reasonable limits when there are women about. But of course Capt. G. is not a rough digger but an educated English gentleman.
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Elsie’s attitude towards British officers was common among the Anzacs, whether sisters or Diggers. Kath King’s husband, Major Gordon Carter, rated English troops as ‘OK’, but had little time for their officers, whom he blamed for many of the Allies’ problems. Behind it all were the ‘social qualifications’ which seemed to determine promotion in the British Army. ‘The military qualifications seem to be left in the background. I have often been appalled at the ignorance of even senior officers in military matters and they seem rather to glory in it, ’ Carter wrote witheringly to his parents.
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Years later, Matron Grace Wilson commented, ‘It seemed at times to the Australian Sister that the Q.A. [Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service] Sister laid more stress on the care of equipment—the orderliness of her ward—and the filling in of Military Forms than the actual nursing of her patients.’
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Ada Smith, a thirty-one-year-old Sister from Warwick, Queensland, was posted to No. 2 Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Messines, south of Ypres and just twenty minutes’ walk from the front. It was June 1917, and the Battle of Messines Ridge was imminent. To take the position, which the Germans had held since late 1914, the Allies dug 8000 metres of tunnel and laid twenty-one mines, nineteen of which were detonated early in the morning of 7 June. The explosions were heard in London and Dublin and killed some 10, 000 Germans. In their wake, nine divisions of infantry advanced under protection of a creeping artillery barrage, tanks and gas attacks. Within three hours all initial objectives were taken in an action that greatly boosted morale, German casualties far exceeding those of the Allies.
But as Ada Smith soon found, that did not mean that only the Germans suffered. ‘At 7 a.m. we heard the Ridge had been taken with “light casualties and shortly afterwards the first wounded began to arrive. I couldn’t see where the “light casualties” came in as all those healthy men came in dead, dying, unconscious or moaning, ’ Ada wrote.
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There was no time to think of the hundreds of casualties. We only knew that work was waiting to be done everywhere, and men were suffering—waiting to be dressed, or to have an injection of morphia, strychnine or other stimulant, and that many had not had food or drink for hours. Everybody worked many hours at a stretch. We had a day and night staff, but how could anyone go off duty with dying and wounded men all waiting for their turn to be next, and you know that it would be hours, before the night or day staff as it happened to be, could cope with the crowded wards?
Everybody tried to have enough sleep to keep them going, without interfering with the way they did their work, realising the best work could not be done without some sleep. But how could anyone sleep, with our big guns firing a short distance from us. Shells bursting overhead, anti-aircraft and machine guns going continually with the noise of the general bombardment and the screach [
sic
] of shells overhead on their way to Bailleul or Neuve Englise. Colonel received great praise, afterwards, for putting through 2, 300 cases in 19 hours—the greater part of whom were operated on, and the foreign bodies removed.
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A week later, 14 June, the entire Messines salient was in Allied hands.
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No. 3 Australian General Hospital, Abbeville, Anne Donnell was depressed by the injuries she had to treat. ‘In France we see the acutest work, and the havoc the war plays on our precious human lives, ’ she wrote. ‘It’s a very sad sight, and while we are doing our level best to restore life, there in the distance is the continual boom, boom, booming from the great guns, which only means more suffering and sadness.’
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The blast from shell explosions could kill by concussion. In addition to the physical effects of shell fire there was the psychological damage. Men who had to endure a prolonged bombardment would often suffer debilitating shell shock, a condition that was not well understood at the time.
At first, affected soldiers were regarded as weak or cowardly. But as the war progressed, and the number of cases increased, shell shock was formally recognised as an illness. The sisters soon discovered that they too, were considered at risk. At No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, Gertrude Doherty found the work ‘exciting’, but the shelling dreadful. ‘After we had been in Bapaume a week the Deputy Assistant Director Medical Services rang up to ask if any of the sisters were suffering from shell shock and if so they were to be sent away, and if any of us were frightened we could go back and that it would be no disgrace to us. When the [commanding officer] put it to us we just roared laughing.’
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The shelling did not improve, and she felt especially sorry for the head cases ‘because the shells distressed them so’.
At night in the blacked-out wards, men relived their battle experiences, grappling with unimaginable demons and screaming in terror. ‘Some of the poor old boys seem in their delirium to live through all their awful experiences again, ’ Elsie Tranter recounted. ‘They call out and seem quite relieved to find one of us near them when they open their eyes instead of the actual fray.’
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