A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front

by Olive Dent

  The ‘big wash’ over, one brews the hot drink – tea, café noir, café au lait or chocolat, or, perhaps, a glass of vin rouge made hot, and served with a little sugar and a slice of lemon, vin rouge at un-franc-dix the three gill bottle and forty centimes back on the return of the bottle!

  Then one caresses and anoints one’s chilblains on toes, heels, fingers, and ears, rubs glycerine and red lotion into one’s cracked chaps, face cream on one’s frost-bitten face, and glycerine on one’s cracking lips, dons pyjamas, nightdress, bed jacket, bed socks, bed stockings, piles on the bed dressing-gown, travelling rug, and fur coat, tries to read in bed, and finds it too cold to have one’s hands from under the bedclothes, thinks of the home folks, to whom one ought to have written, and of the five minutes sewing one ought to have done, decides it is much too cold for any of them, turns out the light, and cuddles down, hoping that one may go to sleep and remain asleep until ‘reveille’ without the necessity of having to sit up in bed and massage numb feet or knees, or without having to get up to do physical exercise of the On-your-toes-rise-lower-rise-lower variety.

  Besides, one must remember, this is the better weather for the men in the trenches, and so long as we have this hard, dry cold, we don’t have those poor, dreadful, blue, purple-black, swollen trench feet among our cases.

  Chapter XXV

  O.A.S. Hospitality

  IT SOUNDS SOMEWHAT Irish in the saying, but it is none the less true that the best part of the day is the night.

  After mess dinner at eight, the day nursing staff is free until 7.30 next morning, so it is then that we do our ‘entertaining.’ This consists of going to one another’s bunks or bell tents, and having coffee and biscuits and fruit and chocolate – and conversation.

  The hostess usually receives us in bed, which is wisdom on her part, for she is out of the way, and that is an important factor in an area where even inches count. The ‘guests’ are customarily in dressing-gowns, garments which are as varied as the costumes at a fancy dress ball, and which hail from the sphere of our fighting grounds. There are dressing robes bought in Valetta, burnouses picked up in bazaars at ‘Alex,’ checked matinées from les galleries in the nearest provincial French town, little turned up slippers from Salonica, boudoir mules bought in Paris and jeered at because they are not of O.A.S. stability, comfortable stodgy English slippers knitted by comfortable stodgy English aunts, and utilitarian ‘slip-ons’ hailing from Oxford Street.

  ‘O.A.S.’ is responsible for some dreadful lapses and some fearful makeshifts. Our meals and our crockery are most unconventional. To-night we drank black coffee from the cup-screw of a vacuum flask, the cup-casing of a spirit flask, a medicine glass, a marmalade jar, a ‘real china’ cup, and a piece of porcelain which in peace days was used to contain face powder, and which was accepted with the remark ‘To what base uses …’ We hadn’t a spoon, only a silver button hook. We ate biscuits from the tin. We ate sugared strawberries, – delicious little wild ones, – with a pair of scissors.

  We talk as gourmets of the food we eat, and discuss the ‘cakes from home,’ dilating on the excellence of the cook, whether she be fat, autocratic, and of long domestic standing, or whether she be a young sister just rawly recruited from a domestic science school. Our tastes, too, are catholic.

  We partook heartily one night of lobster, cheese biscuits, black coffee, ‘plum cake’ from the canteen, and slept just as heartily, and next day laughed equally heartily at the rueful dismay of an old dug-out of our acquaintance, who envied our digestion and rosy cheeks.

  Of course, like all nursing and medical people we ‘talk shop.’ One asks the sister from the recovery hut how the boy is progressing she sent for operation, and one of the theatre sisters answers X’s inquiry about her trephine case, and Y’s question about her amputation case, and we grow keenly interested in descriptions of others, until the girl who sleeps next to the theatre-sister with only a partition between them vows she trembles with fear at the possibility of the said sister coming over in her sleep with a penknife as scalpel and curling tongs as artery forceps.

  The smile she raises is well timed, for the conversation has taken on a tragic tone. The sister from the recovery hut has told how one patient on the dangerously-ill list did not want her to write to his wife ‘because there is a new baby coming this week,’ of how word has come through from home that ‘little sonny’s’ mother is dead, and he must not be told yet, and of how another boy – only nineteen – had opened dying eyes to see some flowers she had taken into the ward, and how pleased he had been for it reminded him of the garden at home. We sit on the floor of the bell tent and gaze out into the night, a night when the sound of the guns is insistent. Our eyes seek the horizon, and we suddenly feel a helpless band of futile women, agonisingly impotent.

  ‘Well, I must go, and thanks for your cold coffee,’ the theatre-sister remarks. Her little piece of naïveté dispels our feeling of sadness. One’s moods occur in patches on active service.

  Only one night in several months have we had an enemy aircraft alarm. We had brushed our hair convivially, and the early birds had retired to rest when we heard the ‘Stand to’ bugle sounded, followed by ‘Lights out’ and ‘Fall in at the double.’ Racing cars, and the sound of many marching feet were the next sounds, and then came a message that each nursing sister had to go to her post, for ours is a tent hospital, and a marquee burns in three minutes, – which is not a great deal of time in which to remove helpless patients.

  The first remark would have delighted the cynic. ‘What shall we wear?’ called one girl from the darkness, the seeming frivolity of the question being set aside when she wondered if, from force of habit, she should go in ward uniform with its preponderance of white, or in dark coat and hat. The next remark got a laugh, and cries of ‘Good old Scotty,’ for it was ‘I’m going to take my money, in case the hut gets hit.’

  In a very few minutes we, our identity and burial discs accompanying, were at the doors of the wards, not entering in case of waking the patients, but gazing expectantly up into the sky, and trying to feel as thrilled and frightened as we ought to have been.

  But the aircraft was beaten back, and all we suffered was the loss of an hour’s sleep, and a little unnecessary preparation on the following nights of placing in readiness gum boots and thick coats.

  Chapter XXVI

  Night Nursing with the B.E.F.

  I DREADED THE very thought of night duty with its tense anxieties, its straining vigilance, its many sorrows. Still I had come to France to ‘do my bit,’ and that bit for two months meant night work. On active service, too, one quickly becomes inured to doing many things one dislikes and detests; any one with the slightest particle of unselfishness could not fail to become otherwise.

  ‘Half-past six, sister’; the batman clumps along the corridor of the hut in stalwart army boots, making enough noise to wake the Seven Sleepers, and night nurses are far from being in the same category as those enviable beings. Half-past six, dinner at quarter-past seven, twenty-five minutes in which to lie persuading one’s self to get up before the reluctant dive from bed must be made. It is at first strange to go on awaking to a meal of roast beef and boiled turnips, etc., in place of the bacon and eggs to which we have for years been accustomed. Still we are adaptable people, and one must eat to live as strenuously as we do.

  NIGHT DUTY, 2 A.M.

  We each take our lighted lantern as we leave the mess, and trudge down to the many rows of long tents whitely glistening under the streaming light of a brilliant moon. A dear old major of the old school meets us and bids us ‘good-night,’ addressing us as ‘My Lady of the Lamp.’ One of the band, however, very much of the new school, thinks ‘the Hurricane Girls’ would be a better title for us, and suggests we could become a passable item in a modern revue – song and chorus, the final effect being to black out the stage for a ‘lamp dance.’

  The weather is a very important factor during night duty in a camp hospital. Each nurse h
as four to – well, ‘x’ – number of tents allotted to her, the number depending on her status and on the division, the medical division having a larger number to each nurse than the heavier surgical division. The nurse passes from tent to tent very many times during the night, her work alternating severally from indoor to outdoor, while the distance she covers is quite surprising. One, gifted with a healthy curiosity, attached a pedometer and found she had walked a little over sixteen miles in the night.

  Pathways have been made and planks laid down between each marquee, but French mud would defy Macadam’s very ghost. We have had nights when wind and rain have raged and lashed, when our hurricanes have blown out directly we have lifted the tent flaps to go out, when we have been splashed to the knees with mud, when even our elastic-strapped sou’westers have blown off, when the rain has stung our cheeks like whipcord until finally with the desperation, the resource, the delightful disregard for personal appearance common to O.A.S. conditions, and owing to the urgency of our need, we have made of our skirts a pair of trousers by pinning down the middle, have stuffed the end of these ‘garments’ into the tops of our gum boots, tied on our sou’westers with a bandage, and then – got along much more quickly, of course.

  The resource and ingenuity of one sister who nursed infectious cases in a camp of small marquees situated in what had once been an orchard, and who to meet the exigencies of her somewhat amphibious work, had a wet-and-wintry-weather skirt made from a groundsheet, could not be adequately acclaimed.

  The rain is occasionally responsible for some few strenuous minutes. Thus the other night a sudden gust of wind accompanied by driving rain burst open the dual outside doors of a hut, the dual inside doors leading to the theatre, and also several windows.

  I ran to close the doors snatching up on my way two green-lined umbrellas which figure in sun-cure cases. These I gave to men with limbs on extensions, and whose beds could not be moved immediately. Much amused they were to lie in bed with an open umbrella at two o’clock in the morning. Beds were drawn out to escape open windows or a leaking roof, mackintosh sheets placed on beds that could not be drawn aside until the orderly could be summoned, bowls placed to catch the drippings from the roof, then help was obtained and the two cases of beds plus extension apparatus had to be dealt with.

  Night duty during winter weather is somewhat of a Dantesque affair alternating between an inferno of cold and work-filled, perhaps grief-laden, patches of light. The marquees are very cosy, tightly-laced blankets wherever doors occur, and stoves cheerily filled. Between each marquee one dodges up to the knees in snow and slush buffeted by wind and sleet, and dipping under the eaves of the snow-laden tents with ill-luck as dogged as in tilting the bucket. In the surgical tents, – where dressings have sometimes to be done every four, and sometimes every two hours, – one develops into a quick-change artiste at shedding and donning garments.

  The normal outfit of a night nurse on winter duty consists of woollen garments piled on cocoon-like under her dress, a jersey over the dress and under the apron or overall, another jersey above the apron, a greatcoat, two pairs of stockings, service boots or gum boots with a pair of woolly soles, a sou’wester, mittens or gloves (perhaps both) and a scarf.

  But there are other nights, nights of spring and early autumn with sheets of streaming, silver moonlight when not a breath stirs. The tent walls are rolled back, and looking down the alley of marquees one can see way down to the silent valley below, nights of radiant, faultless beauty bringing to mind Omar Khayyam’s stanza, and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Apollo Musagetes,’ nights at one with peace and meditation or with nightingales and love, but with foul carnage and blood lust, man’s enmity and man’s agony – No!

  Once on a time I held the extraordinary opinion that night nursing was dull, that all the nurse did was to arrange the patients’ pillows, give a few sleeping draughts, hot drinks, hot water bottles, an occasional dose of cough mixture, put out a light or two, shade others, and sit down to do a little sewing to prevent her being bored before morning came, and the patients were to be washed, and beds made.

  That, by the way, was in the days before the war, when I had no acquaintance with ghastly wounds which require dressing every two hours, when the multiple-wound case was the exception and not the rule, when a ward which was then considered acute we should now regard as full of ‘convalescents,’ when cerebral hernia, tracheotomy, trephine, colotomy, laparotomy, and the evil-smelling gas gangrene were comparative rarities, and certainly not to be found in any one batch of patients, when convoys were unknown, and there was no possibility of the tent-door being pushed aside in the middle of the night, and new patients in the form of pain-wearied men in dirty khaki being deposited on one’s beds.

  My introduction to active service night nursing was a small hut under the same roof as the theatre, a few of the more anxious cases being brought there for special watching.

  Poor boys, almost every patient in addition to other wounds and injuries, had had a leg amputated, and I used to go round from one to another in the dimly-lighted ward with an electric torch, and flash on the light to see that each stump was correct and there was no sign of haemorrhage.

  With regard to work on ‘the lines,’ so far from being dull, one is kept ceaselessly busy, for, in addition to dressings, many four-hourly foments, four-hourly charts, periodical stimulants and feeds, – the latter including jaw-cases where the mouth must be syringed and washed and the india-rubber tube attached to the feeding-cup cleaned and boiled, – there comes the unending, infinitely pathetic call of ‘Sister, sister, may I have …’ a drink, my pillows moved, my heel rubbed, now my toe, my splint moved, my bandage tightened, my bandage slackened, the tent or the window closed – or opened – a blanket off, a blanket on, a hot-water bag, a drink of water, of lemonade, of hot milk, of hot tea, now a cold drink, sister, to cool my mouth, a crease taken out of the under-sheet, the air-pillow altered, my hands and face washed, my lips rubbed with ointment, my fan, that fly killed, a match, a cigarette lighted, another drink, some grapes, my apple peeled, a cushion under my arm, under my back, a pad of cottonwool under my heel, knee, arm, a bed sock put on, the bed-clothes tucked in, I feel sick, I can’t go to sleep. Shall I have an antiseptic, – the almost invariable name for anaesthetic, – ‘to-morrow when my wound is dressed?’ Then when the gamut is exhausted – ‘What time is it?’ ‘What kind of weather is it?’ ‘Can’t I have a prick, sister? Can’t I have a comforter?’ (hypodermic injection). ‘Ask the M.O. when he comes.’

  There are times too, when one hurriedly tiptoes along the ward at the mention of ‘sister’ only to find that it is not a call for help, but merely a patient talking in his sleep.

  Oh, the glad pleasure and the relieved happiness occasioned by a goodly orchestra of many-sounding, many-toned snores! Then one feels that one’s ‘boys’ are at last in comfort and at ease. No wonder so many poets have chosen sleep as their theme, for an inestimably precious gift it is to the over-wrought, pain-wracked body. Cases of insomnia are fairly infrequent with us, for the boys are usually ‘dog-tired’ by trench life, which, with its myriad dangers, has developed among our men the restless, broken, fitful sleep of the hunted animal. So our boys either sleep exhaustedly, the sleep of complete physical weariness, or they sleep brokenly. Thus the R.F.C. boy flies busily each night, invariably in trouble about gauge or propeller or because ‘she is sulky and kicks.’ The Canadian admonishes a rebuke presumably to another Canadian. ‘Don’t swear so much, mate. There’ll be a curse brought down on the place if you swear so much.’ Meanwhile the Corporal is ‘getting the wind up,’ in dire distress because the rations are not getting through.

  ‘Sister, I’ve lost my letter and two bottles of stout,’ calls out a delirious patient. ‘We’ll find them to-morrow when it is light.’ ‘Sister, where is my shrapnel helmet? That man washed himself in it, and never gave me it back.’ ‘I got it from him, and it’s in your locker now.’ ‘Sister, aren’t the stretcher bearers coming?
Aren’t they ever coming? Oh, look, sister, somebody’s going to get hold of me. They’re nearly up to me. I can’t stand up for my leg. Somebody’s tied my feet. Where’s my rifle? He’s got me, he’s got me, and I haven’t my rifle … Oh God! … Oh, my leg. Oh, for a taste of good sweet water. Mate, your hands are free, and I can’t bear this. Shoot me, mate, shoot me.’

  ‘Died in hospital.’ ‘What a pity,’ say some people, ‘that he was brought the journey just to die.’ But it was not a pity at all. Friends of men who have died in hospital have the great consolation of knowing that they had a comfortable bed, drinks for which they crave, at will. They were warm and well tended, and they had – most blessed of all! – drugs. Thank God there is opium and omnopon and morphia to still such delirium as the above.

  Naturally, we have had nights never-to-be-forgotten, nights of aching anxiety and grim, gruesome tragedy, nights that have seared themselves into our brain for as long a time as we shall possess human knowledge and human understanding, nights when we have shared and suffered with delirious patients the stench, the choking thirst, the sound of groans, – all the devilish horror and wracking torture of living again the eternal age with its waiting, waiting, waiting in No Man’s Land, nights when a dying man on whom morphia has had no effect has persistently cackled ragtime while another, – one of the very, very few who have realised they are in the Valley of the Shadow, – reiterated again and again ‘I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.’

  There are moments, too, that have seemed a life’s span, tense moments when we have fought for a life with strychnine, morphia, salines, nutrients, and hot-water bottles, crowded moments when, our lamps throwing Rembrandt shadows and gleams round the dark tent with its rows of huddled, maimed forms, there has been plugged and stemmed a haemorrhage from a place where the surgeon could not ligature, reverential moments when one has stood wiping the dew from the face, taking the clutching hand that perpetually seeks to hold to something, moistening the lips of him who is passing through the Valley of the Shadow. One’s eyes smart and feel filled with salt as a man with life ebbing, – oh! so painfully quickly, – grasps one’s hand and says ‘Sister, God bless you.’ The full meaning of the remark arrests one, its sanctity, its solemnity, the benedictory significance of the words spoken under such circumstances engulf one. It is not as the smug person would say – one feels amply rewarded for what one has done. Not at all. One only feels so utterly unworthy and mean and small.