Frontline Nurses On Duty

by Holly Green

  The interior of the hospital was no more encouraging than the outside. Immediately inside the gateway was a row of latrines, easily identifiable by the smell. At an angle to them was a large, stone-flagged kitchen and opposite that a big, draughty room from which a stone-flagged staircase led to the upper floors. In the rooms above straw palliasses were laid out side by side, crammed together as closely as possible, and every one of them was occupied.

  They were introduced to the doctors, two Belgian and one English, and a small number of Sisters of Mercy who were struggling between them to cope with the influx.

  ‘We are so thankful that you have arrived,’ said one of the sisters, who spoke English. ‘But I regret to say that there is no accommodation for you here. As you see, every inch of space is occupied. You must find somewhere to sleep in the town.’

  That was easily said but hard to achieve in a city already overcrowded with soldiers passing through on their way to the front and refugees streaming away from it. As they trudged round the streets Leo was reminded of the night she and Victoria had arrived in Salonika and she felt a pang of loneliness without her friend. All the main hotels were full and the owners of the boarding houses where they knocked regarded them with suspicion. Women in uniform were unheard of, and the landladies were unimpressed by the news that they were employed by the Belgian Red Cross. It seemed the citizens of Calais had little sympathy for their Belgian neighbours and made few distinctions between foreign nationals of any sort. As far as they were concerned, they might all be spies. By the time she finally found a house that was prepared to take her in, though only for that night, Leo was almost too tired to stand.

  Next morning they all assembled at Lamarck. On the top floor there was a big room with a stove which had been set aside as a kind of common-room and it was there that they were given their duties for the day. Leo knew that most of her companions were expecting to be used as ambulance drivers, collecting wounded from the battlefield, but she was not surprised to learn that they were to be enrolled as probationer nurses. They had been assigned to the various wards and were just about to leave when they heard a loud honking from the courtyard. Leo ran to the window and looked out to see Sparky, with Victoria at the wheel, come to a standstill at the main door. Having asked for and been given permission, she ran down the stairs and threw her arms round Victoria.

  ‘Oh, am I glad to see you!’

  ‘I told you I’d make it. What’s happening here?’

  ‘You won’t be overjoyed to hear me say it’s like old times in Macedonia – but at least we know what we’re up against and we can face it together.’

  As they spoke a mud-spattered horse-drawn ambulance clattered into the courtyard.

  ‘Oh, no! More casualties!’ Leo said. ‘We’re bursting at the seams already.’

  The driver jumped down and hurried over to them, releasing a babble of what Leo took to be Flemish and waving his hands at the rear of the ambulance.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Victoria asked.

  ‘No idea. Let’s take a look.’

  ‘Do you mean to say there’s a language you don’t speak?’ Victoria followed her to the rear of the vehicle.

  Leo lifted the canvas flap and peered inside. By this time they had been joined by one of the Sisters of Mercy and the driver had accosted her with the same urgent appeal. Leo let the flap drop and stepped back. ‘Typhus. No doubt about it.’

  ‘You have met this before?’ the sister asked.

  ‘Yes, in Macedonia. What is the driver saying, sister?’

  ‘He says they have tried every other hospital in Calais and none of them will take typhus cases.’

  ‘Can we take them?’

  ‘We shall have to, somehow.’

  Behind her, Leo heard Victoria mutter, ‘Oh no! Not again!’ But she did not hesitate when the sister instructed them to bring the patient inside and Leo climbed back into the ambulance. Between them they lifted the stretcher with its writhing, delirious occupant and carried him into the hospital.

  Chapter 7

  Conditions in the hospital improved as the days passed. The Red Cross provided proper beds and appeals to charities in England produced bales of blankets, sheets and pillows. More recruits arrived and the FANYs swept and scrubbed until the wards were at least reasonably hygienic, if not exactly homely. They were less successful in improving their own living conditions. It seemed that none of the landladies who ran the boarding houses were prepared to put up English visitors for more than three or four nights, though they resorted to a variety of excuses to explain why their guests would have to move on.

  One morning, on their way to work, Leo and Victoria passed an empty shop, which bore the name ‘Le Bon Genie’.

  ‘I wonder who it belongs to,’ Victoria mused. ‘If we could rent it we could live there.’

  ‘We can’t sleep in a shop window!’ Leo protested.

  ‘I’d rather do that than move every three days,’ Victoria retorted.

  Enquiries produced the answer that the tenants had fled the town and the owner was only too glad to rent the place to someone else. Sheets of brown paper were pasted over the windows and spare beds were carried down from the hospital, though there were so few of them that the night nurses simply fell into those vacated by the day shift. ‘Just like good old Lozengrad,’ Victoria commented.

  The wounded arrived every night by the trainload and at dawn each day the FANY ambulance, which had now been joined by an assortment of other vehicles, including Sparky, set off in convoy for the station. Lamarck was not the only hospital, and the casualties had to be distributed amongst the others before Leo and her colleagues could begin their work on the wards. Periodically news arrived that a hospital ship was in the port and then all those able to be moved had to be loaded into the ambulances and driven to the docks, to make room for new admissions.

  It was not long before the first typhus patients were joined by others, and Leo volunteered to nurse them, reckoning that her experience at Adrianople would be useful. Their care needed more labour than the other casualties. They had to be regularly sponged with cold water to reduce the fever and as there was no running water in the building it all had to be drawn from a well in the courtyard and carried up several flights of stairs. And since there were no chairs or tables the basins had to be placed on the floor, making the actual sponging a back-breaking occupation. Then they had to be fed with great care, sip by slow sip. They were often raving with delirium and could sometimes be quite violent. It was dispiriting work, since, despite her best care, roughly a third of the men died and it was not unusual to come to work in the morning and discover that the bed occupied yesterday by someone she had bathed and fed and comforted now held a new occupant.

  One of the typhoid patients was called Franz. He had been a gunner and had served at the siege of Antwerp. In his delirium he believed he was still there and constantly counted his ammunition and shouted to his imaginary comrades. Occasionally he gave vent to a loud ‘Boom!’, which made everyone jump. One day Leo was feeding another patient when she heard him shouting.

  ‘Cochon! Bastard! Vous avez tuer mes camarades. Maintenant je vous etranglerai.’

  The words were followed by a muffled scream and Leo turned to see Franz grasping one of the nurses, a girl called Margaret, by the throat. She put down the bowl she was holding and ran across the ward, but before she reached him two male orderlies had leapt on him and wrestled him back onto his bed.

  ‘Why did he do that?’ Margaret panted, clasping her throat. ‘I only wanted to feed him.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything you did,’ Leo consoled her. ‘He thought you were a German soldier.’

  There was a rota for work on the night shift, and when her turn came Leo found it a relief. The pressure was less and she had time to chat to some of the men who were on the way to recovery. The ones who spoke French were glad to find someone who was able to converse easily in their language and she made efforts to learn a little Flemish, so she
could communicate with the others. They told her about their families and many of them asked her to write letters home for them. They reminded her of the soldiers she had nursed at Adrianople. They expressed the same meek gratitude for everything she did for them and endured their suffering with the same mixture of stoicism and humour.

  One night the relative peace of the night shift was shattered by a strange throbbing, buzzing sound. Leo turned to the orderly who was on duty with her but he indicated with a shrug that he had no more idea than she had what the noise might be. Leo glanced round the ward, saw that all the men were either asleep or at least resting quietly, and went out into the courtyard. The noise was coming from somewhere above her and for a moment she wondered if it was an aircraft, but very few planes flew at night. Then she saw a huge shape blotting out the stars.

  ‘It’s a Zeppelin!’ she gasped to the orderly, who had followed her out.

  ‘We should take cover,’ he suggested, but Leo shook her head.

  ‘I want to see what it does. Why aren’t our people firing at it?’

  At that moment a searchlight beam sprang up, criss-crossing the sky until it fastened on the Zeppelin, so that it hung above them like a great silver fish. Others joined it and star shells began to burst around it, green and blue against the night sky. Then the guns opened up but the huge craft continued serenely on its way.

  ‘What is it doing?’ Leo asked. The courtyard was crowded by now with staff from other wards but she got no reply except for heads shaken in puzzlement. Then she heard a whistling, rushing sound, followed by an explosion, and the ground beneath her feet shook.

  ‘Bombs! It’s dropping bombs!’ the cry went up, but no one headed for the cellars. The spectacle of the silver craft surrounded by the brilliance of the star shells, which outshone any fireworks display Leo had ever seen, was too fascinating to miss. The Zeppelin circled over them a while longer and dropped two more bombs, then the engine note changed and it throbbed away towards the German lines.

  Soon after that incident, Lilian Franklin – ‘Boss’ to all the FANYs – called for volunteers to take a vehicle up to the front with comforts for the troops and possibly bring back casualties. There was no shortage of offers but Victoria was chosen to be the first, in view of her previous experience, and she naturally chose Leo to accompany her. Two other FANYs, Wilks and ‘Nicky’ Nicholson came with them.

  The rear of one of the ambulances was stocked with woolly socks and mufflers, chocolate and cigarettes and medical supplies and they set off through the crowded streets in high spirits. They had grown accustomed to the reactions of the local people as they went to and from the hospital. They varied from stunned amazement through a condescending amusement to scandalised disapproval. Their uniforms came in for a great deal of comment but the fact that they drove cars was the biggest talking point.

  As luck would have it, just as they crossed the Place d’Armes, the main market square, there was a bang and a jolt and the ambulance swerved to the left.

  ‘Damn!’ Victoria exclaimed. ‘What a spot to get a puncture!’

  They all climbed out and very quickly a small crowd assembled round them.

  ‘Oh, how embarrassing,’ Leo said. ‘How fast can we change a wheel?’

  ‘I like a challenge,’ Victoria responded with a grin. ‘Let’s show the Frogs that we don’t just drive the cars.’

  She set to work while Leo leaned on the bonnet and translated, dead-pan, the comments of the onlookers.

  ‘Zut, alors! Elle ouvre comme un home!’ ‘My goodness, she works like a man!’

  ‘Regarde ses bottes!’ ‘Look at her boots!’

  ‘Et son chapeau! Quel chic!’ ‘And her hat. What style!’

  ‘Crois-tu qu’elle peut nous entendre?’ ‘Non, non. Les anglais ne parle que sa propre langue.’ ‘Do you think she can understand us?’ ‘Oh no, the English only speak their own language.’

  The comments continued in this vein until Victoria completed the wheel change and they both climbed back into the cab. As they prepared to drive off, Leo leaned out of the window and called sweetly, ‘Mesdames et messieurs, le spectacle est terminé!’

  Victoria doubled up over the steering wheel. ‘Their faces! How priceless!’ And they drove on, laughing.

  Once they were out of the city they found themselves on a long, straight road, dwindling into infinity through a flat, featureless landscape punctuated by small clusters of houses and the occasional church steeple. It was bordered on each side by deep ditches, full of mud at this time of year.

  ‘I loathe these cobbled surfaces,’ Victoria complained. ‘They shake you till your teeth rattle.’

  ‘The pavé, you mean,’ Leo said. ‘Well, it’s not comfortable but at least it isn’t full of potholes like so many English roads.’

  ‘I blame the railways for that,’ Victoria said. ‘Now everyone goes everywhere by train no one bothers to keep the roads in good condition. We’re all right on the cobbles but I dread to think what will happen if we end up in the ditch.’

  She had good reason to worry. The roads were thronged with traffic. Columns of soldiers marched towards the front while refugees streamed away from it. There were farm carts pulled by oxen, guns on horse-drawn limbers, detachments of French cavalry resplendent in cuirasses and plumes and occasionally a staff car full of bemedalled officers. Overtaking, or passing another vehicle, was fraught with difficulty. At one point they found themselves behind an old shepherd, calmly driving his flock along the road.

  Victoria, at the end of her patience, leaned out of the cab. ‘Ecoutez! Allez off the bloody pavé, tout suite.’

  Leo chortled. ‘Vita, your French is improving!’

  At intervals they were stopped by sentries manning barriers constructed at angles across the road. They had been given a laisser-passer by the Belgian military command, and also told the password for the day, so these obstacles presented no more than an irritating interruption to an already tedious journey. They passed through Dunkirk and then Furnes, where they saw several buildings that had been damaged by shells and it was there that Leo heard again the sound she had heard for the first time when their ship docked in Salonika; a sound which had been the daily accompaniment to life at Chataldzha. She looked at Victoria and they nodded in mutual comprehension. From behind them a nervous voice asked, ‘What’s that noise? Is it gunfire?’

  Leo turned round. ‘I’m afraid it is, yes. But it’s quite a long way off.’

  Shortly after that they passed the first dead horse, its belly bloated, four legs sticking straight up in the air.

  ‘What do you think? Killed by a shell or dropped dead from exhaustion?’ Victoria asked.

  Leo, thinking of Amber, had to swallow hard before replying. ‘Who knows? I’m certainly not getting down to check.’

  After that they saw more horses and the landscape became pitted with shell-holes. A column of walking wounded passed them, many of them limping, heads or arms swathed in bandages. The sound of the gunfire grew louder and then they all heard the whistle of a shell and an explosion somewhere just ahead. At that point the road made one of its infrequent bends, to by-pass a large farmhouse, and when they rounded it they saw a smoking crater almost in the centre of the road. Victoria stood on the brakes and Wilks and Nicky crowded forward to look over her shoulders. For a moment nobody spoke.

  Then Victoria said, ‘Oh well, there but for the grace of God …’ and put the engine into gear.

  Wilks said in a small voice, ‘You don’t think perhaps we should turn back?’

  Leo was about to speak but Nicky’s robust rejoinder cut her off. ‘Good heavens, no! That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?’

  There was just enough of the pavé left for the ambulance to edge past but it took all Victoria’s skill and Leo found herself staring down into what looked like a bottomless pit of mud and praying that the wheels would not slip over the edge.

  It was late afternoon when they finally drew up at a dilapidated building
which was serving as a poste de secours, where the officer in charge was delighted to receive the medical supplies they had brought with them. The gunfire had stopped and he informed them that they could stretch their legs without fear as the bombardment had finished for the afternoon.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Leo asked’

  ‘Because it happens like this every day,’ he answered. ‘The Boche have a schedule and they keep to it like clockwork.’

  Leo looked across the darkening landscape. The banks of the Yser had been breached and the land around flooded to slow down the German advance and the light of the setting sun was reflected off the water, giving the whole scene an air of unreality.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Nicky said. ‘I thought we were close to the front but I can’t see any sign of either army.’

  ‘That’s because they are all dug in, in trenches,’ Leo explained. ‘Can you see those dark lines? They are full of men, but if they were to show themselves they would risk being blown to bits.’

  They were told that they could not go up to the trenches until after dark so they sat drinking marc with the officer and his men until nightfall. Then they were instructed to follow one of them to a point beyond the village where a doctor would meet them. After that, they must walk in single file with at least twenty feet between them and be prepared to drop flat if the Germans sent up a star shell. They set off, each carrying a bundle containing woollen socks and mufflers, donated by knitters back in England, as well as a supply of bandages and other medical items. Along the way they passed silent lines of troops, heading for the trenches or going in the opposite direction. It was pitch dark by now and they were not allowed to show a light and Leo felt that she had trudged for miles, just keeping the shadowy figure of the doctor in sight.