Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War

by Shawna M. Quinn

  It was probably not her first trip overseas with Mrs. Eldridge. This time the destination was Divonne-les-Bains, a village of about two thousand people on the Swiss border near Geneva that offered restorative spa accommodations in the shadow of the Alps. No doubt the party partook generously of the amenities at Divonne’s Grand Hotel from the moment they arrived in May 1914. But that summer anyone with an ear to the ground would have detected the uneasy currents pulsing through the continent. Many locals reassured themselves that war might still be averted at the last moment, but on August 3 the church bells rang out all over France to herald the declaration, and Warner was there to witness it.

  On the very instant everyone knew what had happened. Gardeners, porters, all classes of men stopped work immediately and rushed to the city hall, where the same hour the proclamation of war was read and mobilization started. The very next day 500 men of the village marched out in uniform — off to the front. . . . [M]any women, after preparing their husband’s and their son’s and brother’s equipment, gave them all the money they possessed, thinking that they would need it to buy necessities. The same women were seen the next day working in various menial capacities to keep their families.

  Two tense weeks passed during which restrictions on communications prevented any news of the war from reaching the village. In the meantime, there was no shortage of “thrilling incidents” to arouse fear and excitement. One of the hotel porters was discovered to be a spy reporting on the district to the enemy; the perpetrator managed to escape to Switzerland, but his complicit wife was imprisoned. A not-so-fortunate shoemaker in the town was found guilty and executed.

  Within a few weeks, staff and volunteers had converted one wing of the Grand Hotel into a fifty-bed Red Cross hospital, though it was nearly a month before the wounded dispatched from the Alsace frontier would reach Divonne-les-Bains to convalesce. Warner was one of the first to volunteer for work in the makeshift hospital, even as most foreigners were fleeing the country for Switzerland. She also helped to train local women to provide basic nursing assistance.

  When the wounded soldiers began to arrive, so did the more gruesome stories. But first the exhausted men had to sleep — one did so for thirty-five hours — and many slept so soundly that they had to be woken forcibly to eat. Others awoke after only a few minutes’ rest, unaccustomed to the hush of the hospital after spending weeks assailed by the booming clamour of the battlefields — men who had finally learned to rest amid the roar of guns now could not sleep without it.

  Stories of vicious enemy acts reached Warner through the soldiers and through her friend, Mme. Lalance, recently returned from Alsace, where she had operated a hospital for French soldiers. If previously Germans had been a faceless enemy in Warner’s mind, a snarling, ruthless image quickly took shape through Mme. Lalance’s reports. She heard how German soldiers had stormed the hospital, held Lalance at the point of a pistol, ripped bandages from the bodies of the wounded to verify that they were truly impaired, and elsewhere shot a Red Cross nurse. Long before she got near the front, Warner’s faith in the protection of the Red Cross symbol or in her chances of surviving an encounter with the enemy must have plummeted, replaced by a deeply buried but persistent fear that all her movements through the war zone were acutely dangerous.

  But then, in mid-December, it was time to go home with Mrs. Eldridge. Christmas was right around the corner, and though the Eldridges generously supported the hotel-hospital at Divonne out of their pocketbooks, this was no place for a well-to-do American in tentative health. Warner would have to accompany them home, then snatch some much-needed holiday rest in Saint John. But images of penniless French women, their men gone to war, struggling to work their farms and feed their dependents; of worn-out, injured men; of need and want everywhere but “no grumbling” seized her with sympathetic admiration and the conviction that she would be “a coward and a deserter” if she did not share everything she had with these stoic people. Long before she left Divonne with the Eldridge household, Warner had resolved to get back to France.

  She spent a few days in New York getting the Eldridges settled and arrived home in Saint John two days before Christmas. There was little time to rest, really, between talking to eager reporters about her activities, getting her passports in order, making her rounds among friends and family, and drumming up material support before her departure on January 13. This time she packed heavy, “taking with her quite a large supply of useful articles contributed by St. John friends who know the value of the work she is doing and the necessity for contributions,” reported the Daily Telegraph. During her whirlwind mission, she must have encountered some confusion when she told people that, no, she was not nursing Canadian or British wounded, and, no, she was not working in a Canadian or British hospital, for the Daily Telegraph went on to note that

  Miss Warner feels that our people do not sufficiently recognize the magnificent courage and spirit of sacrifice shown by the French people. She reminds her friends, in talking, of these things, that while the British have done heroic work, the greater part of the long line from the Belgian coast across to Switzerland, a curving line of 200 miles, is defended by the French. The whole French nation, men, women and children, she says, are deserving of the gratitude and admiration of the world.

  Evidently Warner’s plea was persuasive: not only did her baggage bulge with supplies, but for the next four years a steady stream of packages and cash from her native Saint John would flow unabated.

  Back on French soil, Warner spent an eye-opening few weeks at the American Ambulance in Paris, observing exciting surgical innovations that encouraged her. But soon she felt beckoned by the need at Divonne-les-Bains. As an American “neutral” not contracted to any organization in particular, Warner was free to move autonomously. With nothing urgent to keep her in Paris, she returned to Divonne in February 1915 to be welcomed back as the darling of the village.

  As before, her practise of care in Divonne extended well beyond the hospital into the homes of soldiers’ families. For a war nurse, it was a unique, discretionary mission: at a time when her military counterparts focused most of their efforts on hospital work, Warner cast a wider net. Wherever she was posted, she drew deeply from her (informal) channels of trans-Atlantic supply to find comfort items and money for the most destitute families in the area. She also found ways to stretch and multiply the Saint John donations with schemes that enabled European women and children to supply goods for the insatiable war. When every society in Saint John was busy collecting socks for soldiers, Warner asked her friends to collect yarn, too, which she turned over to village women to knit into socks, thereby offering them the dual advantage of outfitting their fighting men and earning a small income for their families. Her continual shopping, soliciting, saving, and hoarding soon earned her the reputation of a packrat — good naturedly, of course, because anyone could see how quickly these precious articles passed through her hands to those who needed them most. That she even found the time to organize and allocate them while working long hours in the wards suggests an extraordinary efficiency on Warner’s part. It also demonstrates how clearly she understood that easing an anxious soldier’s mind about the condition of loved ones back home made it easier for him to keep on with the grim work of recovery — just as a cheery word about his recovery could shore up the spirits of his toiling family.

  In April, officials began talking about expanding the hospital to four hundred beds and putting it under military control, with Warner in charge of nursing. No doubt she was the most senior nurse currently at the hospital, and this impressive promotion would have seemed natural to the authorities. But Warner’s first thought was one of reluctance to take on the daunting red tape of military bureaucracy. Perhaps as an attempt to educate herself on the administration of larger operations, that May she took a brief tour of hospitals in the Lyon area. After returning, she took charge of at least a sizeable portion of the Divonne hospital and remained there for the summer. But she had
another field in mind.

  That September, Warner suddenly announced that she was thrilled to be moving to an ambulance close to the front, where she would have “a chance to do good work” and be “nearer the Canadian boys.” This was an incentive she shared with many other nurses: all longed to work where there was the greatest need and the greatest chance of seeing familiar faces. Though she knew little about it before arriving, her next post would be with the F.F.N.C. at Mary Borden Turner’s newly established Ambulance Mobile No. 1 in Rousbrugge, Belgium, only twenty kilometres from the strategically important and oft-assailed city of Ypres, and within sixteen kilometres of the front — so close that the wounded could reach her operating room before infection set in.

  Turner may have known of Warner prior to 1915, and they certainly had been in touch earlier that year. Whatever the nature of their prior acquaintance, from early on Warner clearly had the trust and respect of “Mrs. Turner,” herself a Red Cross nurse (though not a trained one) serving as la directrice of the ambulance she had founded. It is interesting to speculate about the relationship between these two women, particularly in light of Turner’s postwar publication, The Forbidden Zone, a probing literary reflection on her experience during the war. In a frank and controversial work that dispenses with the romantic veneer of wartime nursing narratives, Turner confronts the moral contradictions of nursing men’s bodies only to send them back to be re-abused, and she challenges assumptions about what was appropriate for women writers to articulate about suffering. From Warner’s brief remarks about their interactions and from Warner’s rapid elevation to infirmière major (matron) in charge of the ambulance, it is clear that the two women worked closely together in mutual trust. In the stolen moments of conversation, did they disclose a kindred sensibility; did they share a thoughtful critique of the way their grim world was being managed? Whatever they discussed, the postwar world would neither read a frank appraisal from Agnes Warner, who never published one, nor readily welcome Mary Borden Turner’s perspective.

  Many of the other trained nurses in Ambulance Mobile No. 1 at Rousbrugge were F.F.N.C. nurses — hailing from the British Empire and the United States — who worked outside the British military system, moving instead with the French army, with teams of French doctors, caring largely for French poilus, and receiving French military decorations for their most gallant acts. To Warner’s delight, many of the nurses in the area were Canadian. Helen McMurrich, supervisor of the first Canadian unit of nurses to join the F.F.N.C., arrived in Rousbrugge in March 1916 and quickly hit it off with Warner. They travelled together when they went on leave and were still working together well into 1919. Not far away, in Rémy Siding, near Poperinghe, Saint John Nursing Sister Margaret Hare had charge of the busy No. 3 C.C.S. Warner visited her from time to time to compare notes, help with dressings, or observe surgeries. Best of all was the promise that her beloved nephew “B” (Robert Warner Bayard Coster) might be discovered somewhere near the front — indeed, he turned up in a camp near Ypres after some diligent reconnaissance on the part of his Aunt Warner.

  To add to the Canadian camaraderie she discovered in her new post, Warner continued to receive care packages and cheques addressed to her from Saint John. While she was now much busier with urgent cases than she had been in Divonne, she still scrambled to distribute articles and cash to her poilus and their families. There is little doubt that chapter members Mary Warner and Laura (Warner) Coster had something to do with keeping their sister Agnes’s efforts in the hearts and minds of the De Monts chapter of the I.O.D.E., which continued to donate prodigiously. Supply shortages were a fact of life at hospitals such as Mobile No. 1 — as Nurse Warner continually reminded her supporters, it was thanks to their generosity that she was able to help as many soldiers as she did.

  Then someone had an idea to amplify her message. Without actually consulting Warner, a group of friends gathered excerpts from her 1914-1916 letters to Saint John family and friends and contracted local printers Barnes and Co. to publish them in book form. By March 1917, local businesses were selling copies of My Beloved Poilus for $1.00 each, and proceeds from the little chronicle began reaching Warner herself shortly thereafter. What must she have thought about this well-intentioned parade of her private letters before a much broader audience? Did she know that even former premier (and soon-to-be lieutenant governor) William Pugsley was presenting copies as “souvenirs” to the dozens of V.I.P.s he entertained? It is unlikely that she worried about the content of My Beloved Poilus — skulky friends still can make trustworthy editors. The published letters had been modified and condensed with discretion, and none of her more intimate notes, if she wrote any, was allowed to stray into My Beloved Poilus. But she was uneasy about the unpolished style of her letters. To her mother she confided, “I must say it was an awful shock when I first received it, but if the people are interested, in spite of the appalling English, and it sells well, I must not mind. You know I did not even have time to read over my letters and they are rather a disgrace to a graduate of McGill.”

  In throwing back the tent flap and giving the reader a glimpse of the daily rhythms of hospital life, the letters of My Beloved Poilus are illuminating, but inevitably limited by the nature of wartime correspondence. Long before the Saint John “editors” took their turn, Warner herself would have filtered the details to obscure the location and movements of her hospital to satisfy the military censors. This caution is much more pronounced in her letters from the Belgian front than in those written farther back at Divonne-les-Bains, and the need for it must have frustrated correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic. The nurses themselves, however, typically were kept in the dark about the army’s movements and could only speculate (from patterns of gunfire and numbers of wounded) about what was going on around them. In such conditions, rumours thrived and anxieties simmered as nurses waited for real news.

  Quite apart from the dictates of censorship, nurses had other reasons to check their tone and convey a strategic impression when writing letters. Motives were as much personal as political, for if a nurse was unable to remain duly selfless and optimistic — even “cheerful” — about her part in restoring the wounded to victory, where would that leave her or her dependent charges and the possibility of re-establishing life as she once knew it? Despondency and introspection were dangerous when everything depended on swift and passionate action; a “chin-up” attitude was crucial for encouraging sustained contributions of men, materiel, and morale from home. Figuring prominently in Sister Warner’s letters, therefore, are the ongoing needs of the soldiers, the hardships borne bravely by local women, the triumphs of recovery, and gratitude for contributions. Her tone, though, is practical and matter-of-fact, rather than probingly reflective. In any case, clutching the stub of a pencil in her frozen fingers after eighteen hours on her feet, she did not have time to ruminate on what she had experienced, let alone wax literary. But she would summon her most earnest eloquence in detailing for bereaved French families the last brave hours their men had spent in her hospital before succumbing to their wounds. Then she might have a few minutes to scribble a letter home — lighter fare, though no less obligatory, even though there must have been moments when Warner was sorely tempted to bypass pen and paper for the relative rapture of just closing her eyes and ending the day.

  As a trained nurse, Warner was no stranger to the gruesome sight and heavy smell of infection, the sickening cross-section of severed limbs, or the unnerving actions of a dying man. The gleaming blades and points of hospital instruments, the bustle of routine, the pressures of assisting at operations, the position one adopted when leaning over a miserable patient — all had long since been part of her reality but not subjects about which to write home. But now she was forced to come to grips with horror writ large: families torn apart, women struggling to feed their families, convoys of refugees, muddy, shattered soldiers. All this, combined with the perennial shortage of materials and personnel to meet the need, would have prese
nted impossibilities she had never encountered at the New York Presbyterian Hospital School for Nurses. The need to heal the desperately wounded, moreover, was leading to new techniques, such as “plastic” surgery to reconstruct demolished faces, therapeutic massage, and new methods of dressing gangrenous wounds to permit ongoing irrigation with a germicidal treatment known as Dakin’s (or Carrel-Dakin) solution. Dakin’s treatment posed a special challenge for nurses because it required almost constant adjustment to manage the tubes and pumps — but it reduced the rate of amputations, which nurses were eager to avoid.

  But new healing techniques could not keep pace with the sinister inventions of wartime: guns that hurled shells faster, farther; aircraft that dropped death and dismemberment from the sky; and, perhaps worst of all, vicious poison gases that swept into Allied trenches and choked all hope of recovery for thousands. Causing debilitating chemical burns on the skin and respiratory membranes of the patient, contamination with chlorine, phosgene, and, later, “mustard” gas could easily claim a man’s life — or worse (Warner felt), his eyesight. The pain of gas burns was often unendurable and the nursing arduous. Some cases had to be protected by bed tents against contact of any kind except careful swabbing with neutralizing solutions. Warner first mentions gas on her arrival at the front in September 1915, when both sides were using chlorine and phosgene weapons. In 1916, she declared gas “the worst thing I have seen yet” — not a superlative to be taken lightly from a nurse who had treated every variant of hideousness the war had manufactured to date. (Mustard gas, introduced by the Germans in 1917, had even grislier effects.) Despite the foul smell of gas masks and the inconvenience of working in them, nurses must have been grateful to have them.