Murray simply had to wing it. “In fear and trembling,” she recalled, she gave the child a smaller dosage, then watched very closely for a reaction of any sort during the operation. Fortunately, she had guessed correctly, and the patient came through nicely. She kept going with the patients that followed.
“The next morning,” she said, “the commanding officer appointed me official anesthetist for the hospital.”
Throwing everyone from first-aid practitioners like Ernest Barss to medical students like Florence Murray right into the mix wasn’t an issue with the patients, who weren’t inclined to spend much time investigating their caregivers’ medical credentials.
When a volunteer at the Armories asked Joe Glube, the young tobacco shop owner who had been delivering victims to hospitals, if he could chauffeur a doctor, Phillip Gough, on house calls, he readily agreed. When patients required more care than Dr. Gough could deliver from his medical bag, they drove them through the accumulating snow to the nearest hospital, then went back to visit the next house.
It turned out that Dr. Gough was not a medical doctor but a veterinarian, yet on that day no one complained about his work.
Murray’s classmate and close friend Hector J. Pothier had also been thrust into administering anesthesia at the Victoria General Hospital. “For the following week,” he recalled, “it was work around the clock, with precious little time to eat, sleep, or change clothes.” But, he added, “When you face a problem yourself and you solve it yourself, it always stays more embedded in your mind. . . . The practical experience acquired due to the explosion, although so dearly paid for by the people of Halifax, was a tremendous value for studies during the remainder of the semester.”
“Never did doctors, students and nurses work harder than through-out that Thursday and into the small hours of Friday morning,” said Dr. George A. Murphy of Victoria General.
Camp Hill Hospital, located on the Halifax Commons where thousands had sought refuge during the panic thanks to its location near the Citadel, was the closest major facility for Richmond’s victims, and the busiest. A committee official at City Hall sent the McGraths, Elliott, and Ernest Barss to Camp Hill to help with the throng of patients, including Barbara Orr.
Finished the year before to serve convalescing soldiers, Camp Hill’s entrance became choked within an hour after the explosion with every manner of vehicle, from ambulances to wheelbarrows, bringing a flood of casualties. The hospital’s convalescing soldiers were quickly converted to orderlies and tasked with hauling stretchers throughout the building. In the first twenty-four hours alone, Camp Hill provided shelter, food, and medical care for more than 1,400 victims—more than five times its capacity. And yet, due to its new clientele, Dalhousie University professor Archibald MacMechan wrote, “Camp Hill will almost always be a synonym for horror.”
Another doctor remarked, “You couldn’t tell the living from the dead.” The Camp Hill patients were like nothing the doctors had seen before, “bathed in blood and the flying dust and debris of ‘the black rain’ soaked their clothes and dyed the skin underneath a dark, dirty gray.”
Dr. W. B. Moore of Kentville, Nova Scotia, confessed, “Many of us had seen terrible sights of human tragedies and suffering but nothing like this in the immensity of the number, and the frightful and various character of the injuries. Men, women, and children of all sorts and classes were literally packed in the ward like sardines in a box, the cots all occupied, and the floors covered so that it was difficult to step between them.”
Like every other building within a few miles of Pier 6, Camp Hill’s windows had been smashed. The staff draped blankets across the empty frames, which left the rooms both cold and dark.
The McGraths didn’t bother waiting for someone in charge to give them orders. The day called not for obedience but initiative. Their directives came from the desperate and dying lying wherever they turned, from those quietly asking for help to others crying “Here! Come over here!” The McGraths jumped in, stanching bleeding wounds, setting broken bones, bandaging burnt skin, and stitching wounds of all kinds, which was made trickier due to the bits of wood, glass, and plaster often embedded in them, not to mention the oily soot that covered almost everyone. No amount of careful scrubbing seemed to get it off.
Stores of anesthetics throughout Halifax quickly ran low. But if the doctors, nurses, and volunteers were heroes that day, so were the patients. Almost everyone aiding the victims was struck by their remarkable fortitude, allowing the doctors to operate without anesthesia—“unthinkable under normal circumstances”— the kind of desperate measure even the medics at the Western Front tried to avoid. True, many victims were still in shock, but this quiet toughness continued throughout the weekend, after the initial symptoms had usually worn off.
Dr. Murphy recalled, “There were pale faces enough, but their eyes were dry; there were no tears. . . . The suddenness and horror of the disaster was too great to find expression in that way.”
The depleted cache of medicine forced doctors to decide who would get a tetanus shot. Because the serum was also in short supply, the medics disciplined themselves to use it only on the deepest wounds. They guessed right: out of 9,000 patients, only two cases of tetanus were reported.
Like most people aiding the injured that day, the McGraths “lost all track of time and all sense of fatigue and hunger.” At about six that evening, relief trains carrying more doctors, nurses, and volunteers arrived from New Glasgow, about 100 miles north. Every helping hand was a godsend—and never enough. The McGraths stayed on.
Dr. G. H. Cox started operating in Camp Hill’s kitchen at half past six by the light of a single bulb, with the few surgical tools he’d brought with him. He operated until half past seven Friday morning. Thirteen hours of nonstop surgery, working as fast as he could to get to as many bleeding patients as possible. By the time Dr. Cox was relieved by Captain Frederick T. Tooke, his surgical instruments had become so dull from cutting and ripping through so much skin, muscle, tendon, and bone that “they could no longer cut.”
In Halifax, Cox mended “faces torn to tatters, as if clawed by a tiger. The wounds were stuffed with plaster and dirt. Some eyes were literally bags of glass.”
If seasoned surgeons were often overwhelmed by what they saw, the children at Camp Hill, whether visiting, helping, or staying, often got more than they bargained for. Helena Duggan, an eleven-year-old girl who had survived the destruction of St. Joe’s in Richmond, had accompanied her father to Camp Hill so he could be treated. To pass the time she walked around the hospital, where there was plenty to see. But when she looked into a bucket on the floor and saw that it was filled with human eyes, she was done looking around.
C Company was a group of local teenage girls who volunteered to knit hats and provide other sundries for the soldiers. On December 6, they offered to help out at the hospitals until more nurses arrived. They followed surgeons around holding bowls of water containing dissolved blue tablets to disinfect surgical implements. This necessarily put them in position to watch surgeons treat glass wounds, disjointed limbs, and oozing burns. Several members of C Company became nauseated and had to leave, but one sixteen-year-old girl not only stayed but came back the next day.
Although Barss had no medical training beyond the basic first aid all soldiers received, the city was grateful for anyone who could still walk, see, and lend a hand, so he was permitted to perform tasks normally reserved for medical professionals. He threw himself into the frightful work for three days, working on only a few hours of sleep.
He told his uncle Andrew that as soon as he and Elliott arrived at Camp Hill, they “got to work—and believe me there was plenty of it to do. Poor, wounded people everywhere. On the beds, between the beds on the floor, in the corridors, on mattresses and blankets, everywhere they could find a place to put them, and still they were coming in.
“And the wounds were terrible. There was every kind I ever saw at the front, but a great majority have hea
d wounds. Hundreds of people lost their eyes. In one of the operating rooms where they took only eye cases, the surgeon took out one hundred eyes the first day, and then handed them over to the next man to operate.
“The stench of blood was almost overpowering. Several of the trained nurses keeled over at the sights. As for me, I had seen so much of that kind of thing that it didn’t bother me at all. I was assigned a trained nurse and a V.A.D. [Voluntary Aid Department nurse] to help me, and my how we worked; I dressed every kind of wound, set several fractures, and did a number of [surgeries] as well.”
When Barss was relieved at four the next morning, Friday, December 7, he had completed a nonstop fourteen-hour shift. He got a few hours of sleep somewhere, then came back at 8:30 Friday morning for more. If he ever wondered whether medicine might be his calling, it would be hard to construct a more intense introductory course to find out.
For all the inhuman demands on everyone in that hospital, they all benefited from patients who insisted on waiting for others with more serious injuries to go first, and a volunteer medical staff that refused to complain about functioning at the highest levels for the longest hours without proper operating tables. Quite the opposite: there was a chorus of comments on the remarkable esprit de corps and sense of mission that defined their crews, not to mention a surprisingly high degree of calm and order throughout the facilities, amid the most chaotic days Halifax had ever seen.
Having inherited a horrible situation, the medical professionals from Halifax and beyond were making the very best of it, and very quickly.
Chapter 26
Blizzard
Friday, December 7, 1917
The sunny, balmy conditions of Wednesday night, December 5, had already given way by Thursday afternoon to more typical overcast skies, colder temperatures, and light snow. Deputy Mayor Colwell anticipated the need for more housing and heat that evening, but few expected any unusual weather that night.
The Halifax Herald’s “Maritime forecast” for Friday, December 7, was quite routine for the season: “Moderate westerly winds. Fair and colder.” The Amherst Daily News predicted “North and north-west winds. Mostly cloudy and cold. Local snowfalls near the Nova Scotia coast.”
Once again, Haligonians had little idea what they were in for. Severe, sustained snowstorms are rare in Nova Scotia before New Year’s Day, due largely to the ocean’s moderating effect. But the world once again made an exception for Halifax. Throughout Thursday, a storm that had started brewing off the Carolinas was making its way up the East Coast through a thick cloud cover, timed to land in Nova Scotia at the end of the most tragic day in the city’s history.
But Colwell was surely right about the housing crisis. The explosion destroyed 1,630 buildings and damaged 12,000 more, leaving some 25,000, almost half the population of Halifax-Dartmouth, without adequate housing and dangerously exposed to the elements.
After Deputy Mayor Colwell asked Colonel W. E. Thompson for help with temporary shelter, the Engineer and Ordnance Corps outdid itself, putting up tents on the North Commons for 250 people, equipping them with canvas floors, cots, blankets, and oil stoves, and adding temporary hospital accommodations, more than enough to keep people warm through the cold night ahead, in a clean, safe environment—a rare commodity that first night.
But while the soldiers and volunteers waited for a crowd to arrive, a funny thing happened: no one showed up. Patients refused to be transferred, even from the most crowded corridors, and thousands of uninjured Haligonians opted to ride out the night in homes missing windows and walls, heating, and often plumbing, rather than spend the night in a canvas tent. After seeing granite buildings toppled like toys, Haligonians weren’t too interested in swapping their heavily damaged homes for tents, no matter how much sense it made.
Thousands of survivors decided to make the best of their homes. To make just one room suitable for human habitation usually required shoveling out piles of broken glass and debris, boarding up open windows and doors—when they could get their hands on some boards—or just tacking up tarpaper, blankets, or cardboard. Stores soon ran out of those supplies, too. After doing all that, the best many residents could hope for was a cold, dark, and drafty home, but they didn’t complain, frequently pointing out that others had it worse—and they knew that was true, because as soon as they were done patching up their homes, they helped neighbors who were less fortunate.
For thousands of others whose homes could not be made livable anytime soon, the best bet was to think of a relative or friend who lived far enough away to have escaped most of the explosion’s wrath, but close enough to walk to, then hope they opened the door and let you in. There was no way to ask beforehand, and if it didn’t work out, you had to think of someone else, and start walking.
Volunteers working for the Transportation Committee relocated 5,000 people to the homes of friends and family and to hospitals, relief centers, and temporary hostels set up in a handful of downtown buildings. This relocation effort created a new breed of hero: the emergency drivers, who worked as hard and long as the doctors and nurses. At City Hall volunteers fed them in a lunchroom that they staffed day and night.
When Thursday, December 6, 1917, came to a close, few homes contained the same people they had that morning. Many families had been split up in the confusion, and didn’t know where their relatives were—or if they were still alive. People felt unanchored, and hallucinations were common. In the Devastated Area, which had been stripped of power, plumbing, and infrastructure of any kind, heat and light were provided by fires and torches.
But most of the 25,000 Haligonians who lost their homes found somewhere safe to sleep. It was a good night to rely on the kindness of strangers, who seemed particularly ready to help, and thousands did.
To the horrors of the biggest man-made disaster in the history of the world were added the caprices of Mother Nature. That night the temperature fell more than twenty degrees, from a high of almost 40º Fahrenheit down to 16°—bone chilling on a good day, but particularly painful on this one.
Far worse was the wind and snow that came with the temperature drop, howling through open windows, burying the dead, and forcing the living to spend the night bent over their stoves, trying to stay warm enough to make it to the morning.
During that long, cold night, many of the seriously wounded, some still trapped in their homes and factories, could not endure the additional trauma and died. Premature births and stillbirths were brought on by falls, injuries, and shock. Yet in the windowless shelters and overcrowded hospitals, babies came into the world. Against all odds, the forces of life were stubbornly reasserting themselves.
When morning broke on Friday, December 7, the world had flip-flopped yet again. Thursday’s hellscape, with half the city crushed and fires burning everywhere, had been covered in a sixteen-inch-thick blanket of pure white snow, freezing everything beneath it. The storm that had sneaked in the night before revealed itself to be a roaring blizzard the next day, the worst in a decade, with gale-force winds attacking the town at 40 to 45 miles per hour, snapping twigs off trees, tearing tar paper off broken windows, and knocking down what had remained tenuously standing up.
By Friday afternoon, December 7, the rescue workers who had spent the previous day navigating through boards, bricks, broken glass, and dead bodies now had to contend with heavy, damp snow that soaked their clothes, clouded their vision, and covered the roads and everything left on them in thick drifts.
When a sailor named D. G. O. Baillie saw Halifax for the first time that morning as his ship entered the harbor, he noticed that “a pall of smoke hung over the ravaged city, and infernal gloom half-hid the remaining buildings so that at first we thought the whole town had been destroyed.”
They were eager to help, but their goodwill was tested when their commanding officer ordered them ashore to dig out “the innumerable bodies known to be buried in the ruins.” They had no training in the very particular craft of rescue, so “at first we stum
bled about aimlessly over piles of masonry and shattered timbers. The bodies were frozen stiff as wood or stone so that often the blow of an axe or shovel would slice off an arm or leg. It was a gruesome experience and more than once I saw a shipmate turn aside to be violently sick.”
Their nonstop hard work was not enough to keep away the cold, which nearly cost Baillie a toe to frostbite.
The train tracks that had just been painstakingly cleared of rubble from the explosion were now smothered once again in deep drifts. The snow covered the ruined factories, the schools, and the homes, some with survivors still trapped inside. Soldiers were directed to stop removing debris and start removing snow.
In the harbor, the high winds wreaked almost as much havoc as the tsunami had, tossing ships about until their anchor lines snapped and sending them wherever the wind and waves wanted them to go. Naval crews had to leave needy victims to secure drifting vessels and remove heavy flotsam before they created yet more damage.
The weather affected the recovery mission in other ways, too, discouraging some victims from leaving their broken homes to seek medical attention, increasing the chances of them freezing in their homes and preventing rescue workers from getting to them, or even getting to their own homes for a few hours of much-needed rest.
The Transportation Committee reported that practically all the automobiles they had commandeered the day before had broken down in the storm. But the “motors” had done their job, helping to move nearly a thousand people, many of whom likely would have died if they had not been rescued in time.
The age of the horseless carriage was coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet. While the horse-drawn sleighs had their own troubles getting through, they fared much better delivering warm clothing and blankets for the homeless than the cars, which could be seen abandoned on roadsides all over town.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 24