Warner’s stayover in New York gave the Saint John devotees time to prepare an ambitious welcome home. Her sisters and brother John, along with enthusiastic members of the I.O.D.E. (De Monts Chapter) met her at the train on March 29 and whisked her into a whirl of receptions, teas, and tributes at which she was not only the guest of honour but the keynote speaker as well.
First, the Royal Standard Chapter of the I.O.D.E. had its turn, presiding over a studio festooned with flags, bunting, and flower arrangements in red, white, and blue. One lady had the vision to place a flag of France “most artistically so that it seemed to mount guard over Miss Warner and to appreciate its privilege of caring for one who had done so much for La Belle France.” It must have struck a grand emotion to hear the orchestra play God Save the King, The Star Spangled Banner, Rule Britannia, O Canada, and “with most impressive effect, the glorious music of the Marseillaise.” Soloist Miss McKnight moved the audience with the touching First World War ode to nurses, “The Rose of No Man’s Land,” and other contemporary hymns to peace and victory. On account of her Belgian heritage, Mrs. D. Mullin was selected to present the address:
After four years of heroic self sacrifice, untold hardships and unswerving devotion to the noble cause of humanity, you the daughter of that distinguished general . . . have returned to the land of your childhood — this Canada of ours — to enjoy a well merited rest from your arduous labors. Yes, after four years of patient, gratuitous toil among your beloved poilus, to whom you were as a ministering angel alleviating the sufferings of their sick and wounded, regardless of the attendant discomforts ever surrounding you, you have come back to us decorated with every distinction that France could bestow. Yet were the Recording Angel to ask concerning your works of mercy that which you desired he should set down in his “Book of Gold,” notwithstanding the distinguished honors conferred upon you, we feel you would adapt the words of Abou Ben Adhem, who said: “Write me as one who loved his fellow men.”
Not surprisingly, Warner’s reply deftly shifted the accolades where she felt they were more appropriately due.
[She] thanked the chapter for the occasion and the gift saying that she had done no more than many other nurses and had felt it a great privilege to be able to do her part. She said that she had often heard that men cannot bear suffering as can women but she could never agree to this since she had seen her wounded Poilus suffer such unbelievable things with courage, fortitude, endurance and resignation in order that freedom and liberty might prevail.
How she must have struggled to describe these unknown soldiers with their unseen wounds to friends who could never fully visualize endless mud-caked, blistered, bleeding bodies. How her audience must have struggled to understand what it was like to internalize that dreadful responsibility for so many lives. But, by implicit contract, both parties expressed themselves in glorious superlatives rather than gritty realities, leaving most of the “unbelievable things” locked in the minds of Agnes and others like her who could never forget them.
When Warner did relate her experience, it was in rolling narrative, with the air of an adventure story. On April 7, she spoke to a group of one hundred and fifty members of the Women’s Canadian Club gathered for another lavish reception in her honour. Several other Saint John nursing sisters were present (most of them C.A.M.C.), although club president Mrs. Kuhring regretted that it had not been possible to invite all of the area nursing sisters, only those who had received decorations. She stood to thank the nurses who had “given these examples of great womanhood and gone where others could not go to care for in the most minute way those precious bodies which meant so much to those at home.” Then she introduced the guest of honour. In its report on the occasion, the Saint John Standard noted: “On rising to speak, Nursing Sister Warner, who was greeted with prolonged applause, said that she thanked all present for the honor but that she had only done what the other sisters did.” Then Warner went on to give highlights of her movements through Divonne and later Belgium.
At one hospital where Miss Warner was they took the badly wounded cases who could not go any farther, but who would have died without the care the nurses were able to give them. The speaker here paid a high tribute to the work of the French surgeons and French priests. . . . They were at first inclined to be suspicious of the sisters, asking what these foreign women who were not “religious” were doing there, but a Franciscan monk who had been nine years in Montreal said, “Wait and see,” and soon they were the best of friends and worked together caring for the men.
There was a Church of England clergyman, an ambulance driver, who sometimes could hold a service but at other times the sisters went to the Roman Catholic services held in a little chapel made of wood just big enough for the priest, while the people remained in the road. . . .
The winter of 1917 was the coldest one, and there was no fuel to be had, everybody was cold except the patients, and the sisters would often go out and gather up sticks. A Belgian sentry used to give them a few bags of coal and these were repaid by smokes and comforts. Near this place was a Canadian Engineers’ camp, and Miss Warner told of Capt. Morrison’s ruse to meet with the sisters and share their tea. Once while the sisters were having tea a general came to the hospital and asked for Mrs. Turner. Miss Warner talked with this visitor and he seemed so disappointed at not finding Mrs. Turner, and knowing there would be no tea nearer than Dunkirk she invited him to stay. Introducing the nurses, Miss Warner realized that she did not know the guest’s name, but knew from his ribbons that his distinctions were many, and on inquiring he answered “Prince Alexander of Teck.” Miss Warner said she got weak in the knees, but he was very nice and came to see them several times. He was the British representative in the Belgian Government.
The report in the Standard continued:
Speaking of the air raids of which many occurred Miss Warner said she did not hold with the theory that when hospitals were bombed it was accidental. The planes came near enough to see the black crosses on them so it was clear the Germans could see the red crosses on the hospitals. Once a nurse had half her foot taken off and several times patients were injured while in their beds. The raids were frightful.
Many and pathetic were the stories told of the men. One big Scotchman came in shell shocked and very violent. On being given a hot cup of Washington coffee, and spoken to in English he came to himself. “You are among friends and quite safe,” Miss Warner told him, and asked what he wanted. “My mither,” he said. “That was always the cry,” Sister Warner went on to say, “English, French or Canadian, and it was our privilege to take the mother’s place as far as we could.” The Washington coffee made with a fire of solidified alcohol had saved many lives and the stream of it had never ceased.
At one hospital the Americans were met with and their general feeling seemed to be of resentment that they had not been allowed to come sooner. “We got here a bit late but we’ve got to do our damndest,” one westerner said.
Supplying their hospital from the trenches abandoned by the Germans, a stove which they were just going to light was found to be full of hand grenades, and Miss Warner said it made her blind with rage to see the wanton destruction everywhere. The cruel treatment of the children in the conquered areas was another description which made her hearers feel the horrors of the Huns and the state of the prisoners who reached the French hospital was indescribably pathetic.
The report concluded:
Speaking of the soldiers, Miss Warner told of the care they took of the sisters who were all alone on the French front but went everywhere with perfect safety and without any fear. “Make all excuses for the men,” she said. “We have seen them at their best, patient, uncomplaining, thinking only of others. No one, except those who were there can realize what the men did. They were wonderful. Don’t spoil them, give them work but count nothing too much to do for them. Wash off the mud, and you’ll find the pure gold. We sisters can never be grateful enough for being allowed to help.”
; Three days later, a “thronged house” of Saint John High School alumnae heard another account, reported in the Daily Telegraph:
Of the patients’ field hospital to which she went after the first year of the war Miss Warner told many wonderful things . . . of the boy field telephonist who thought his oxygen treatment was more telephoning, and said as he died that God was at the other end of the line; and of the orderlies drawn from all ranks and classes, twenty-seven of them priests, and some more intellectual than practical, even to the extent of using cocoa instead of a cleanser to scrub a table.
Miss Warner described the King and Queen of Belgium as she had seen them when they visited this field hospital. The queen had inadvertently been shown Miss Warner’s own room which as it was used as the storeroom for supplies from home was more useful than tidy and was known as “The High Class Bazaar.” The king, she said, was keenly interested in flying and often flew over the hospital.
The gifts sent from St. John had been of untold worth in emergencies especially, Miss Warner said, and the money from the book of her letters published by George Cushing had, she said, been put to such excellent use that she had almost forgiven him for publishing it. One of the pictures which she showed at the close of her address was of two patients wearing De Monts Chapter dressing gowns. . . . [S]he was able to assure the audience that all supplies they had sent would be put to good use as any that remained are now being distributed to the refugees and returned prisoners.
The report added:
Miss Warner had afterwards accompanied the ambulance that followed the 36th regiment [sic] through the devastated regions around St. Quentin. She told of the hurried marches through the dreary land where sign posts said of a heap of ruins that before the war this was such and such a place. She described the venturesome journeys for supplies returning by darkness through a wilderness of mud and shell holes; and told also of the joys in one French village retaken after four years of German suppression where French flags had been unearthed from their burying places and the people welcomed their own grey clad soldiers for the first time, never having seen the French uniform.
Of the scarcity of all materials and how the inhabitants contrived to do without she told many strange tales. A spool of thread was valued at $4 in one village and the children saw cows for the first time after the Germans were driven from the town. The devilish cruelty of the Germans was illustrated by Miss Warner in several forcefully told stories.
She appealed to her hearers in conclusion not to think that now the war was over France needed no more help. Her soldiers were not being welcomed as ours are. They were returning to desolate homes. Thousands of her villages were more desolate than Halifax after the explosion and many men knew not whether their families were alive or dead. For our own returning men she asked that they be dealt with patiently for they had endured almost the impossible. While at the front there was nothing that was not noble; in the idleness of inaction at the rear there must be discontent and trouble. There were two forms of vision, she said. [Of] two men looking from the same window one would see mud and the other stars. The stars were there if they were only looked at and even in the mud of Flanders the nurses had seen them reflected brightly.
Warner’s defence of soldiers’ conduct holds an interesting hint that her audience had been exposed to media reports over the course of the war tarnishing popular images of military chivalry. This appeal for leniency coming from the irreproachable figure of a nurse was a powerful endorsement, and she seized this public opportunity to offer it as well as to reassert the “devilish cruelty” of the enemy. In her lectures, she made a point of contrasting very “feelingly” the essential nobility of one side with the demonstrated depravity of the other. Did this conviction come from reflecting on the debased behaviour that she witnessed, including even her own patients’ enthusiasm for violence? As she bent over dressings and listened to her poilus boast about how they had routed the enemy, did a peaceable nurse from Saint John require a comparative morality to come to terms with the ugly actions of both sides without sliding into a paralyzing relativism? She was now reassuring others as she had herself: that the enemy perpetrated the greater inhumanity — and more gratuitously.
As a lifetime achievement, nursing in the War to End All Wars was a tough act to follow. The day-to-day intensity and personal growth could not be matched by anything in the nurses’ experience before or after. Gripped by the awful thought that the rest of her life would be nothing more than a denouement, an F.F.N.C. colleague of Agnes Warner’s lamented: “Alas! I have said farewell to the most interesting period of my life. Never before have I, a plain and poor person, been able to realize myself. . . . I do hope I don’t shrivel up again when they no longer need me.” Another affirmed: “This great responsibility, and closeness with tragedy, seem to have started one off growing again. . . . I really am a bigger person, humanly speaking.” Alert, independent, and confident from their time at the front, these women were reluctant to trade the passion of emergency for the stifling confines of routine. They worried that they would soon tire of regular nursing.
Continuing as a military nurse was not an option, since army authorities reduced the C.A.M.C. to its pre-war size, retaining just a handful of permanent nurses. But there were new opportunities to be seized in the nursing field. The influenza pandemic of 1918 required many health-care hands, and great numbers of returning veterans needed the professional service of nurses trained in physiotherapy to help them reintegrate into work and family life. New spaces for travelling public health nurses and mental health nurses reflected changing societal attitudes about public health education and mental illness, while positions in schools and health centres with the Red Cross and the maturing Victorian Order of Nurses (V.O.N.) occupied a greater number of nurses than ever before. By 1921, the number of nurses in Canada had more than tripled from a decade before. Many of them were demobilized military nurses trying out a new sub-vocation in one of these developing fields.
The extent to which the war was a catalyst for greater gender equality even as it summoned a powerful impulse to reinstate “comfortable” pre-war conditions, including traditional gender roles, is still a matter of debate. True, many women had contributed to their nation’s war effort by filling factory and farm positions in the absence of men, proving they could perform effectively in male-dominated roles. But now these same women left their posts to returning veterans and many went back to their firesides. In the relief and chaos that followed the Armistice, it became clear that wartime changes would be considered a temporary aberration; that women on the homefront had been encouraged to act in the place of men only “for the duration.” And women at the battlefront had not been welcomed into male roles at all, but were restricted to non-combat roles as nurses, aides, and clerks. Ultimately, though women’s wartime service and bravery may have helped to “earn” them the vote (in the rhetoric of the day), it did little to augment materially their social and political power or to weaken the polarity of separate spheres in the postwar decade.
For Warner, who returned from the war in questionable health, like so many of her beloved poilus, a full-time career in nursing was likely out of the question; so, now in her late forties, she entered semi-retirement. Thereafter, she kept busy with “missionary activity” (possibly volunteer work) with the Saint John Health Centre and cared for her aging mother in their South End home at 11 Pagan Place. She also corresponded faithfully with many of her former French patients and their families, sharing a unique bond with them that only battlefront initiates could truly fathom.
Sister Warner would live only seven more years. Her final trip to New York was to seek treatment at the Presbyterian Hospital for the most serious phase of the unnamed illness that still afflicted her. Sadly, there was little her alma mater could do to restore her, and she succumbed to the illness on April 23, 1926. Arrangements were made to carry her remains back to Saint John, and the following stormy Sunday a large congregation gathered for a heroine�
�s funeral at Trinity Anglican Church and final farewells at Fernhill Cemetery.
Aside from the brief, obligatory lecture circuit when she landed back in Saint John and the periodic wartime letters that kept family and friends apprised of her work, there was no evidence that Warner continued to process her wartime experiences with a view to publishing them. On the contrary, eulogizers praised her “modesty” in keeping silent about her overseas achievements, declaring that “at no time has she said a great deal of the life she endured.” In reality, conditions in New Brunswick after the war probably did not invite a frank recollection of what happened or any attempt to grapple with its rawness. Acquaintances who had spent the war on Canadian soil may have been willing and eager confidantes, but they lacked the terrible literacy of front-line work that the nurses now carried. And others who themselves had returned from overseas carried their own unique experiences and processed each memory differently. In the postwar world, it is hardly surprising that so many nurses pulled a screen across their war work in order to get on with their interrupted lives and forge a “new normal.” It is even less surprising that they kept silent about what they encountered near the front. Moreover, many nurses must have internalized the persistent ideal of selfless “modesty” that applauded a woman for claiming nothing particularly important about her own experience. Were it not for Agnes Warner’s friends promoting the letters on her behalf, Saint John and the wider world might never have discovered a New Brunswick nurse’s faithful service to countless families, nor had the opportunity to be humbled by the boundless compassion she showed her beloved poilus.
Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War Page 12
