Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Though they failed to stress it in their journals because of the traditions of stoicism they had acquired in their Australian girlhoods, indications of the slighting treatment some nurses received emerge nonetheless. ‘At times our presence was ignored by an officer, with the result we had little control over the orderlies,’ wrote Sister Nellie Morrice. She declared that the patients thought otherwise because they lay there inadequately treated, ‘dishevelled and dirty . . . looking more like wild men . . . unshaven, long haired and weeks of dirt and vermin on them’.

  Prior to 1914 military officers had not necessarily been used to working with nurses, since military nurses worked only in the largest medical units, the general hospitals, usually situated about 150 miles behind the front. The presence of Kit McNaughton and her fellow nurses in a stationary hospital in a military camp at an advanced place was therefore beyond the experience of some of the professional military doctors. Sister Neeta Selwyn Smith of Number 3 General Hospital wrote in her post-war report to Colonel Butler, the official medical historian, that ‘I believe the OC said he would rather have a hospital without sisters’. Captain Deakin, a medical officer, reading a paper for the New South Wales branch of the British Medical Association in December 1916, declared that in the high summer of 1915, when the slaughter on Gallipoli was intense, ‘all the nursing had been performed by our male orderlies, who by this time had become expert nurses and could take temperatures and pulses, give hydrodermic injections, enemata and “bowel washouts” as well as any nurse’. His recommendations were that male orderlies should be made efficient to make the presence of female nurses unnecessary in a stationary or general hospital.

  Deakin’s confidence in an all-male staff is contradicted by Sister Morrice. She says that on arrival on Lemnos in September the nurses found men lying on muddy mattresses on the ground, and that dysentery patients were forced to hobble outside, dressed only in their nightclothes, to use commodes in the icy wind. ‘It did not take the sisters long to get the beds raised . . . [we] kept the men in bed and ordered that bed pans should be given to them.’ The Australian nurses were also aware that the nurses in the Canadian hospitals nearby were paid more, and better treated and appreciated, and to be efficient they needed to battle their resentment about that.

  As the autumn came on, heavy dews attacked the fabric of the tents and penetrated the canvas walls to the extent that sisters had to huddle in the same cot for warmth. Gales swept over the island for the whole autumn, creating cold sandstorms. The women lacked warm clothing and Colonel R.J.H. Featherston, Acting Director of Medical Services for Australia, ordered that they were to have gumboots, trousers and warm clothes even if that meant wearing men’s clothing. Featherston cabled back to Melbourne that the women would break down if their situation wasn’t improved, and that ‘if the sisters were not better treated he would take them off the island’.

  For an island designed to treat men with typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery and other plagues, as well as the severely wounded, water was still scarce. Men and nurses had to balance the laundering of clothes against the need for bathing. The nurses regularly brought lice from the hospital tents and the foul uniforms of the sick back into their sleeping quarters, and Sister McNaughton took a cold sponge bath at eleven o’clock one freezing night to ‘keep the creepy things away’. Food was primitive, but sometimes naval officers from ships on the harbour sauntered up and invited them to a rare afternoon tea or dinner aboard, and the young women rushed to accept the invitation. Some men from the Australian Field Artillery on the island sent over a hamper to them, but generally, as Sister Olive Haynes wrote in October 1915, they could not get a boat to go out to the ships to fetch food for them ‘and the MOs won’t help us’.

  As in every other hospital in that theatre of war, nursing units were dealing with greater numbers than had been foreseen. In France it was believed that a stationary hospital should take only 240 patients and be staffed by twenty-seven sisters. Number 2 Australian Stationary Hospital had 840 patients, and this multiplied both the work and the infection rate. The flies of summer were only beginning to die off and dysentery afflicted patients and nurses. As autumn came on and the weather cooled, paratyphoid and jaundice took over.

  Dr Featherston meanwhile claimed that Australian nurses, working under Imperial Regulations as ‘honorary officers’, were subjected to ‘threats of personal violence’ as well as ‘petty annoyances and insults’, arising from continual disputes with NCOs and orderlies about the nurses’ authority. In a hospital where the commanding officer did not like female nurses—Number 2 Stationary seems to have been such a place—the position of the nurses was nearly as testing as the campaign at Gallipoli itself. Featherston recommended that Australian nurses be given commissioned rank to wear, and in 1916 this would become the case.

  Staff Nurse Tilly was discovered at Number 3 Australian General Hospital at Lemnos sitting in a dark ward on a mattress on the floor with a private soldier. Though she argued her innocence, Colonel de Crespigny, the commanding officer, wrote that, ‘I am of the opinion that her conduct cannot be condoned, on account of the example to other members of his unit.’ Nurse Tilly was sent home and asked to resign. But under the intense conditions, potent feelings, maternal, sisterly and amatory, were released. Kit McNaughton said that she was ‘fast losing her heart’ to an ill soldier, ‘but he is just like Corry [her brother] so I can be excused for loving him’.

  Yet as hostile as some of the orderlies and officers were, the nurses were welcome as visitors to the rest camp. Sister McNaughton wrote of going to a concert where she and her friend were the only two sisters in a crowd of 2000 men and were cheered to the front seats. It must have been a welcome contrast to their treatment in the wards. By October Kit McNaughton was showing some signs of exhaustion, depression and withdrawal—she could no longer identify with every individual in the mass of suffering and remain sane. In December she wrote, ‘Saturday—life much the same, one big bustle and no one prepared for the invasion of patients—not enough to eat for anyone.’ The next day they were expecting another 200 patients, of whom she wrote, ‘God help them.’

  Later, on the Western Front, her dissatisfaction and anger would emerge in what she called a ‘brush-up’ with imperious British matrons and medical officers. She would be told by an imperial matron not to speak to Australian soldiers while treating them. She became angry at an Australian medical officer for his treatment of a soldier. She had such a quarrel with one medical officer in 1917 that she thought she might be sent home, and in the end had to apologise for not obeying his orders.

  Nurses from Queensland and Victoria formed union-like bodies to agitate for better wages and conditions than the very poor ones they had enjoyed in their pre-war nursing and their early war experience. After the war it would be predominantly former AIF nurses who took part in the Trained Nurses’ Guild activities. Yet the women were also liberated by the war from the strict social controls and demands of civil society. On Lemnos Olive Haynes, along with some other nurses, simply cut off their long hair rather than go to the trouble of looking after it. By now they all dressed like soldiers and went out so dressed to pursue a social life, including an excursion to the hot baths at Thermos in the company of artillery officers from the rest camp. On the way up the switchbacks to the spa they undertook target practice with the officers’ revolvers.

  In December 1915 the Gallipoli Peninsula was evacuated. Sprained ankles suffered in the last withdrawal down the slopes to the beach were the almost-benign final Gallipoli injuries the nurses would deal with on Lemnos. They returned by hospital ship to Egypt in January 1916, ‘the funniest looking crowd of weather-beaten and toil-worn women one could imagine—hats of various shape, coats ditto. And boots and gloves beyond description.’ Sister Tev Davies wrote, ‘We are being supplied with riding pants, tunics and gumboots. Golly, won’t we look tragic?’ They were different women now, quietly proud of what they had don
e, and sufficiently haunted and educated by experience to have risen above the style of submission in which they had lived at home. But in Egypt they were now broken up and sent to various units—some to return to Australia on hospital ships, others to go to England and to France.

  THE BLOOD MYTH UNASSAILABLE II

  The withdrawal from Gallipoli in December 1915 seemed so brilliantly managed that for generations of Australians it would have the weight of a victory, not a retreat. Somehow the Anzacs were able to get away over a number of nights while an ever-shrinking number of troops held the line. The same process would occur with the British, Indians and French at Helles but would not be completed until 8 January 1916.

  Even so, the British General Monro estimated that a third of the men would become casualties during the withdrawal, and many of the wounded would not make it off. As well as that, in late November when the planning meetings for the evacuation had just been held on the island of Imbros (the Turkish island of Gökçeada) and on the Aragon, where General Monro had his headquarters, cold rains fell so torrentially that at Suvla Bay, north of Anzac Cove, men were drowned in trenches. The flooding was followed on 29 November by snow, and the Anzac evacuation was delayed by a sudden tide of casualties suffering from both frostbite and gangrene of feet and hands.

  From the Anzac area over 40 000 men had to be withdrawn. From 8 December onwards the first 20 000 left by dark, and by 17 December just over 20 000 held the line, but would in their turn creep by squads down the ravines to the beach over two nights, and be taken off by cutter and barge to the troopships waiting to return them to Lemnos and Egypt. Amongst the troop transports were three of the largest liners then afloat: the Britannic, the Aquitania and the Mauretania, which between them could take some 8000 wounded and sick, had been commissioned as hospital ships for the evacuation.

  The terrain and the methods used helped maintain secrecy. One unnamed Australian wrote of making his way up to the line through a sap when his path was stopped by descending mules carrying stripped-down mountain artillery. ‘I thought at once, “My goodness, if the Turks don’t see all this as it goes along they must be blind.”’ But when he had trudged on another two hundred yards or so, the sound and sight were all lost in the broken ravines of Gallipoli. Taken off too were the Egyptian and Maltese labourers who had helped carry burdens and had built the piers, and the little railway which ran goods ashore from Williams Pier.

  Harold Edward ‘Pompey’ Elliott, the Melbourne lawyer and citizen soldier whose brigade would be one of the last to leave, told his men that anyone who was heard to mention the word ‘evacuation’ would be court-martialled. At the centre of the legendary cleverness of the withdrawal was a device which was brought to General Elliott’s attention early in the evacuation process. A twenty-year-old architectural modeller, Bill Scurry, who had been at Gallipoli only a few weeks but who had served as a lieutenant with Pompey in the Essendon Rifles, had designed a system by which water in a higher placed container dripped gradually into another beneath it, which was attached in turn to a rifle trigger. In the end the lower container pulled the trigger and fired the rifle, creating an appearance that the thinning lines were in fact still heavily manned. On the second last night, 20 December, 10 200 soldiers made their way down to the beach leaving 10 000 to endure a final day in the lines opposite the Turks. Then, on the last night, the men left at spaced intervals, down the hills to the transports, headed for the rest camps of Lemnos. In Australia the withdrawal was not seen as a defeat, nor did the soldiers involved seem to look upon Gallipoli as a fiasco. Or if they did, some of their morale had been restored by the triumph of the withdrawal.

  The last on the Gallipoli Peninsula, willing to stay there and be captured if necessary, were to be the 13th British and 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Stations. Supplies adequate for 1200 men for thirty days were left at these clearing stations. It was hoped that the Turkish military would respect the wounded and allow them to be eventually repatriated by the Red Cross. On the final night of the withdrawal, the seriously wounded were not to be transported but their wounds were to be dressed, and they were left behind with a volunteer force of doctors and orderlies. In the end, Captain Alan Barton of the Australian Army Medical Corps, a man still only in his mid-to-late thirties who would become an expert on battlefield anaesthesia and wound closure, volunteered to stay with the wounded. He was kept company by a small party of Australian Medical Corps personnel and was left with a letter written by the head of the Australian Medical Services—the formidable Neville Howse VC, a veteran of the Boer War and Taree surgeon—addressed to the Principal Medical Officer of the Turkish army. ‘I am leaving Captain Barton of the Australian Army Medical Corps and a small party of AAMC personnel. I have every confidence that our wounded will be treated with the same care and kindness as we have treated yours.’ It was even hoped that after the 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station was captured by the Turks, the enemy might allow the wounded to be collected by British transports under flags of truce. But Barton was able to begin moving out his last casualties on the night of 20 December, and then, before dawn, he and his party left that scene of so much agony and fear and went out to the last transport. To considerable relief on Colonel Howse’s part, Captain Barton and his volunteers turned up at Mudros, the harbour of Lemnos. One of his orderlies had been hit in the arm by a spent bullet and Bartlett believed him ‘probably the last Anzac casualty’.

  Death amongst his fellow professionals had not been uncommon. Captain G. Mathison of 2nd Field Ambulance had died in May of wounds received at Helles, Captain S. Campbell in July of wounds received at ANZAC, and Captain J. Buchanan of 2nd Light Horse, rescued from Gallipoli, would die on Mudros in December 1915. Nor was that anywhere near the full toll of stretcher bearers, orderlies or doctors Gallipoli claimed.

  INTERLUDE: PATERSON AND WORLD WAR I

  Without formally being a correspondent, Banjo Paterson enlisted for the Great War on an apparently voluntary basis. A dashing fellow such as he, though now fifty years old, could not but take part in the collision between the Man From Snowy River and the Prussian Lancer. At the extraordinary Australian Voluntary Hospital on the Normandy coast at Wimereux, he volunteered to drive an ambulance during the French and Belgian campaigns of 1914–15. On the way, in Egypt, he had taken note of the Anglo-Australians landing, looking to join their old English regiments and ‘wearing as many ribbons as prize bulls . . . Any one of them who would sooner be shot as a private in the Coldstream guards than get a decoration in a nameless Australian force.’ In reality, some of these Yorkshiremen, Cousin Jacks and Cockneys, rebuffed by their old units, would fall in numbers in Australian units at Gallipoli.

  At Wimereux the institution mentioned above, the Australian Voluntary Hospital, was run by Lady Rachel Dudley, a beautiful ‘shop-girl’, a former fashionable milliner, and the estranged wife of the former Australian Governor-General, the Second Earl of Dudley, George Humble Ward, a philanderer and man of limited gifts whom Andrew Fisher had despised. Appointed in 1908, within little more than six months he refused Fisher’s request for a poll. Deakin, who was the beneficiary, nevertheless did not feel any sense of loss when Dudley returned to England in 1911. The more gifted Lady Dudley, appalled by the lack of skilled help for women giving birth in the bush, founded the Lady Dudley Bush Nursing Scheme.

  Her hospital at Wimereux, established when she was in her early fifties, existed as an exercise in well-intentioned willpower. For its comfort and less formal atmosphere, many an Englishman recommended it as the place to get into if you could. ‘She’s a Quaker by birth,’ wrote Paterson. ‘Comes from that Gurney family of bankers; and if you want a real good stubborn fighter get a Quaker.’ Others, predictably, described the Australian Voluntary Hospital as a ‘petticoat-ridden outfit’. But the Royal Army Medical Corps, which disapproved of the Australian nurses on Lemnos, reserved an especial hostility for Lady Dudley, who was nonetheless too well connec
ted not to be obeyed. It is a sad after-note to this remarkable woman’s history that she would drown while swimming in Western Ireland in 1920.

  Meanwhile, Banjo returned to Australia in 1915 and was commissioned in the Second Remount Unit, an appropriate posting given his passion for horses. Promoted to captain, he served in the Middle East, was wounded in April 1916, but rejoined his unit in July. He was promoted to major and commanded the Australian Remount Squadron.

  Left: The striking, sculpted face of Henry Lawson is clear-eyed yet melancholy in this photo portrait of the early twentieth century. A.G. Stevens of the Bulletin paid him sixpence a line for verse that inevitably varied in quality because he was always hard up. (State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library, a2005230/ ON 186/228-232) Right: Catherine Helen Spence came to Adelaide in 1840 as an adolescent immigrant. Electoral reform, the vote for women and proportional representation left her no time for more novels (the last written in 1894). She was combative and beloved, and much mourned when, after publishing her autobiography, she died in 1910. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic an14617296)