The War Nurse

by Tracey Enerson Wood

  That men should brothers be,

  And form one family,

  The wide world o’er.”

  The crowd was silent, then roared in approval. They hugged one another and cheered. Someone started a chorus of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and Major Murphy raised my arm as if I had just won a boxing match. For once, I was proud of my low contralto. Truly, I had taken up the violin because I had been embarrassed to sing with the men in the church choir. But here, none of that mattered. Music was reminding us of our common mission, of strength and togetherness.

  I had played with passion; I had sung with joy. It was a glorious moment that I shall never forget.

  * * *

  My family and friends back home were so dear in their letters and sent me whatever I wished for that could be shipped. How much to share with them was always a matter of consideration. I wanted to be as honest as possible while at the same time not worrying them unnecessarily about problems they couldn’t do anything to fix.

  I tried to sound upbeat, as indeed I was generally well and happy. But one evening, even as my stomach rumbled due to not having enough time to eat properly, I wrote the following letter:

  Dear Family,

  We are well settled into our routine here; our new system is flowing like the Hudson to the ocean. Yes, I still long for home and to see all of you, but our task here is great, and I am honored to be part of it, in whatever small way.

  The food is nourishing and plentiful, so you needn’t worry about that. Although the fare does become rather monotonous; the ginger treats you’ve sent were well received by all.

  For example, we have eggs, sometimes powdered, sometimes fresh, and flapjacks for breakfast. Also a dark, strong-tasting sausage made from pig blood that takes some getting used to. Dinner is typically a jelled ham from a tin, dried beef, or salted fish. Our provisions come from England mostly.

  Now here we are, in the midst of a country with a rich history of enticing foods, and we eat tinned gray meat from London! I’ve made up my mind to see what I can bargain and barter from the locals. If for nothing else, it will make my nurses so happy and raise morale during the long work days. Do not worry one tiny bit about me. I am doing what I love and wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Cheerio for now, and hope all is well there.

  Lovingly,

  J

  Although more or less true, I could only hope my family didn’t see my words for what they were: the ramblings of a hungry person.

  * * *

  After the British left, we once again became American Expeditionary Forces Base Hospital 21, at least to us, as we were still officially No. 12 in the British system. This simple thing raised the spirits of my nurses to no end. Perhaps it was also due to me declaring one of the spaces vacated by the British as a nurses’ lounge. Now the nurses had a more comfortable place to gather and chat among themselves about the day. We moved the piano into the room, which was about the size of a large American bedroom, and they had sing-alongs as well.

  Of course, I gave them their privacy. After all, what they wanted to complain about could very well be me! But I would poke my head in occasionally, and usually they would invite me for tea.

  On one such occasion, some nurses were discussing what they would do after the war. Dorothy said, “I am a nurse. I will continue to be a nurse, wherever I’m needed.”

  Another said, “No, I will go back to a normal life. Get married, raise a family, work on the farm.”

  “Yes!” another agreed. “Isn’t that what the war is about? To have freedom, just to live your normal life?”

  Margaret said she wanted to go to school, to become a “real” professional, a doctor or lawyer, maybe. She dreamed of going to the University of Pennsylvania.

  “Isn’t nursing a profession?” I asked.

  There was a long silence, then Margaret answered, “How can it be when it’s only for the duration? A profession is a career. You do it for life.”

  “Then women don’t really have professions,” Charlotte said. “Unless you consider motherhood a profession. But even then, your babies grow up and no longer need you.”

  “Matron, what do you think?”

  I contemplated all their ideas. Things I had often thought about myself. My goal was always—and still was in many respects—to become a physician. That seemed my true calling, a profession I had a proclivity for since childhood. That door had slammed shut in my face, but I hoped that with my nursing and war experience, it might just pry open again. But was that what I still wanted? I started thinking out loud.

  “Are you not a mother once your children are grown and not in your care? Is an author not an author when she merely stares out the window, dreaming of characters? Is a soldier not a soldier when he holds no gun in his hands? A nurse is a nurse in every fiber of her being, whether she comforts the mother of a baby with a fever or holds the hand of a dying neighbor. Some choose to make it their only career; some move on to other things. But nursing is in the heart forever.”

  Shortly after, a conversation with Major Murphy gave me more insight. We were preparing the operating theater for the arrival of the ambulances. He was so good about helping out in that way, and I learned much about instruments and new techniques during these quiet times. For example, he showed me paraffin-coated sterile bottles he had procured from another hospital. They were to be used for blood collection—the paraffin and the addition of citrate to coat the interior helped prevent the clotting that had been a tremendous problem.

  I noticed a supply of gas masks on a shelf and asked him how they were used in the operating theater.

  “We’re still sort of experimenting with them,” he said. “There have been studies on giving concentrated oxygen for lots of different things. Miners, divers, and people who have lost a lot of blood, among other things.” He showed me a large metal tank, which looked for all the world like a torpedo. “We’ve been working with a British doctor, John Haldane, figuring out ways to get the oxygen into the patient. One of the most promising is, believe it or not, through a gas mask.”

  He briefly explained how it worked, the importance of the seal around the face, the valves and filters and such. It was quite the contraption. It seemed much more effective than our current practice of holding a tube, connected to a coated silk bag of oxygen, in the patient’s mouth. This could be strapped on, freeing the nurse for other duties.

  “What a fascinating thing for a doctor to do. At one time, I desired to be a doctor myself.”

  “Why, when you are clearly suited to nursing?”

  “Some don’t see nursing as a profession. More of something to do while you’re waiting for your life to happen. Even the men that do it only stay with it for a short while. I have a feeling marriage and children are not in the cards for me, and I can’t see filling charts and changing dressings my whole life.”

  “First of all, don’t rule out starting a family. Some smart, sophisticated, and worthy man will eventually wear you down, and you’ll allow him to marry you. Next, I am shocked that you dismiss all you and the other nurses do. Why, we physicians couldn’t function without you.” He set aside the gas mask and moved on to a table heaped with instruments ready for sterilization. I adjusted the flame on the oil stove to bring up the temperature of the vat of simmering water.

  I accepted instruments to drop into the boiling water, the splash burning my hand. “Ouch.” I shook the water off my hand. “They wouldn’t want to anyway.”

  He grabbed a cool, wet rag and placed it on the burn. “Here’s how I see it. The nurses run things, sort things out, so we doctors can make the final diagnosis. Which, of course, the nurses already know, but they like us to feel important. Then we are like the mechanics of the automobile. We take out the bad bits, shine up the muddy ones, tighten this and that, and”—he swiped his hands against each other—“pronounce
her fixed. Then it’s up to the nurses to get her back on the road.”

  The idea stuck with me. My dreams of becoming a physician began to fade that day, not because I thought I wasn’t able or it wasn’t possible but because a new, brighter dream was taking its place.

  After the instruments had boiled, we both donned sterile rubber gloves. I moved a set of scalpels from a pot of cooled water to a cloth-covered tray. “Mechanic. Ha! I will have to share that with my nurses. And I shall have to share it with my uncle Lewis. That will redden his face.”

  “Uncle Lewis?”

  “Dr. Lewis Stimson. Surely, you’ve heard of him. The first surgeon to operate in the United States using Lister’s aseptic method. Also operated on Ulysses Grant.”

  “And founder of one of our top medical schools. Of course I’ve heard of him.” He folded a sterile towel over the instruments. “I didn’t realize you were related. No one at the university ever mentioned it.”

  “I was careful not to. Nor my grandfather, a president of Dartmouth, my cousin, high up in the State Department, or my aunts and uncles who are inventors and philanthropists. My family doesn’t believe in riding each other’s coattails.” I puffed up like a peacock. “‘Pick something important, and be the best at it’ is more our motto.”

  * * *

  The nurses all adored Major Murphy. He was not only a great supporter of me, but he spent every moment of every day doing for others. If a hut ordered twelve eggs and only six appeared, he would commandeer the telephone to fix it. He found coal stoves when there weren’t any to be found, and oil for our lamps. When the roller bandages or surgical supplies didn’t arrive as expected, he would hunt them down.

  And they gathered like smitten schoolgirls when he told tales of his days at Harvard. His very favorite concerned a certain football game, which he proclaimed to be “worse than any day I’d seen in the war.”

  It was a game of the two famous rivals, Harvard and Yale. The game disintegrated into an all-out brawl, with teeth knocked out, heads smashed to the ground, and plenty of kicks to the kidneys. The major himself spent several hours unconscious after a bad blow to the head. “We weren’t allowed to play each other for years after that!” he said, somehow ebullient over the whole thing.

  This was all in addition to his duties as a surgeon. When he could escape the office and no patients were in need of him, he played baseball with the enlisted men. Heaven only knows when the man slept.

  I heard complaints from some of the chief nurses of other units, who weren’t so fortunate to have this type of support. For example, they made rules for their nurses, only to have them reversed by doctors in charge with no good reason or explanation. I counted my lucky stars daily to have Major Murphy looking out for us and the whole hospital.

  How different things would have been if Dr. Valentine had been in charge. It seemed he was more interested in keeping nurses in check than in letting them rise to their full potential. For example, I had authorized my team leaders to go directly to Dr. Murphy when I was not available. He burst into my office late one afternoon, carrying what appeared to be a tray of surgical instruments. His face was reddened; I braced myself for a fight.

  “I never authorized nurses to use these on burn patients.” He rattled the metal on metal.

  “Dr. Murphy did.”

  “You need to see me about these things. And your nurses shouldn’t be consulting the chief at all.”

  I shuffled papers on my desk. Signed something random, just to be ornery. “I authorized them to.”

  “You’re circumventing the chain of command,” he blustered.

  “What would you have them do? I can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Well, I… You have to figure that out. But stop taking advantage, just because Dr. Murphy is sweet on you.”

  I had the distinct feeling that Dr. Valentine was operator in chief of the gossip grapevine. “Thank you, Dr. Valentine. I’ll keep that in consideration.”

  CHAPTER 6

  July 1917

  With the exception of a few admin persons and a straggling officer or two, the British were gone, and our dietician and head cook were finally able to plan and prepare meals that were more familiar. They saved a few of the favorites from the British menus, such as bangers and mash and Yorkshire pudding, but the baked beans and black blood sausage at breakfast thankfully faded away. The supplies still came from London, so orders for things like jelly or bacon met with some strange results. Alice Stedman, our head cook, told me the “jelly” that was sent consisted of a box of cherry-flavored powder, to be used to make a jiggly, sweet gelatin dessert, and the “bacon” was a salty ham.

  We generally ate family style, the food presented on large trays that we passed around each table, taking a reasonable portion, of course. The nurses had their own mess tent, but the rules weren’t strict, and sometimes orderlies, doctors, or even walking patients would sometimes join us.

  There was plenty of food, but it had to be ordered, prepared, and budgeted for, and we were all very conscientious about not wasting anything. We saved scraps for stray cats and dogs, and inedible things like eggshells and bones were put in a compost heap or sometimes saved to make stocks.

  All my life, I had a healthy appetite. When I saw the tiny portions the nurses at my tables took, I started cutting back what I served myself. But I found myself getting hungry between meals. I was relieved when we started getting packages from home, as they sent me some of my favorite food treats.

  Still, with the long active days, with miles and miles of walking the wards, I was getting a bit thin. Late one evening, having run out of my private provisions from home, I wandered into the kitchen tent, hoping to find a snack. I was also hoping that no one would be there, to avoid the embarrassment of seeking extra rations between meals.

  But Alice Stedman was there, drying some stock pots. I turned around in my tracks and tried to sneak back out without being seen, but it was of no avail.

  “Now, where you be off to, miss?” She followed after me. “Is that you, Matron?”

  Alice was a short, stocky woman, who seemed to have a bad hip and walked with a limp. She was from either Alabama or Georgia, and her accent was so thick it sometimes seemed she was speaking another language.

  “Oh, didn’t mean to bother you, Miss Stedman. I’m sure you’re all closed up for the evening.”

  “You’re a tall one, aren’t you? From the look of you compared to a month ago, I don’t think you’re eating enough. Don’t you like my food?”

  “I like it just fine. Much better actually, since the Brits left.”

  She laughed. “Well, I tend to a more southern style, which might not be to your liking. It’s how we make it back in Alabama.”

  Alabama. I made a mental note.

  “I was just about to fix myself a mess of beans. Like to join me?” she asked.

  “If it’s no trouble.”

  She made up two big bowls of green beans, which were cooked down very tender and flavored with bits of ham and some browned onions. I wolfed it down faster than was polite, and she scooped more into my bowl.

  “So why you gettin’ so skinny?” She loaded a huge forkful of beans into her mouth.

  I looked away, feeling heat rise up my face. “I try not to take more than my share. But it seems I’m accustomed to quite a bit more than others.”

  “Now, you listen to me. You’re a big woman. Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. But there’s not a scrap of extra on ya, and a woman needs a little extra to keep healthy.” She wiped her mouth with a kitchen towel. “I understand you’re in a fix, dining with those tiny slips of things and wanting not to look greedy. So I’m gonna make you a little something in the evenings and leave it in your room, if that’d be okay with you.” She winked. “Just between us.”

  She scraped back her chair, and I did the same and rose
to leave.

  The image of gobbling up extra rations in my room like a feral dog gave me a moment’s pause. But only a moment, because my now satiated self declared, “I would love that. And if there’s something I can do for you…” I reached to collect my bowl.

  She waved me off as she collected both bowls. “Don’t tell nobody.”

  * * *

  The British had wanted the hospital to be as cheery and homelike as possible, for both the patients and the staff. They planted all sorts of flowers in the greenway in the center of the racecourse, and the track itself remained mostly free of tents and buildings. Red geraniums, blue delphiniums, irises, and fragrant sweet alyssum created a riot of color against the tender green grass.

  As Rouen was notoriously rainy (the French called it Le Pot de Chambre due to the resulting muck), the flowers grew profusely, even spreading to areas between the huts that hadn’t been planted.

  One day, gray with the constant drizzle, a mongrel dog showed up, shivering and cowering in the greenway. Underneath a covering of dirt, he was light tan in color. The nurses fed him, washed him off, wrapped him in a blanket, and placed him by a warm stove. We couldn’t keep him, of course; how would we prevent him from wandering into the theater or instrument rooms? But they named him Sam, and once you name them, they’re yours.

  Sam seemed to mostly attach himself to Major Murphy, perhaps due to the scraps that the major suddenly was unable to keep on his fork.

  The dog would sit by Major Murphy’s side at all meals. Never begging, just performing cleanup duty. The major also enjoyed taking Sam for walks in the morning and midday. He invited me to join him, and despite my objections of being too busy, I did. Soon, this became a habit, then the habit a necessity.

  On our walks, we talked about everything and nothing, from how to handle difficult cases or how to improve administrative routines to the more personal. I learned he had been married to a woman named Cornelia, then widowed at a young age, and now had a sweetheart back home. Then I learned the sweetheart was breaking his heart.