I do not know how I am ever going to manage to write down all the things
I am learning and all the wonderful impressions that are beginning to
crowd upon me. But I feel as though I could not bear to lose them; and
so many new ones will come every day, I surely will lose them if I don’t
write them down at once.
We arrived last evening but did not dock until this A.M. at 7.30. We
were met by a Colonel B., who said he came to welcome us in the name of
the Director-General and the King. He was an extremely affable old tall
thin boy in a much-decorated uniform and a swagger stick. He told us we
were to stay in Liverpool 24 hours, the nurses at the Adelphi and the
doctors at the Northwestern, and that to-morrow at 11 we are to be
conducted to London, to stay there at the Waldorf Hotel four or five
days, and then to be sent to France. He said the Cleveland Unit had
already been sent over, the Boston one was to go to-day, and the New
York one Wednesday. The Philadelphia Unit and we are to stay together as
far as London, but will be sent to separate destinations. We know where
we are to go, but if I should tell you now the censor would cut it out.
We can tell you later, not before. Anyway we are delighted, for we are
to have lots of work, and mighty hard work too. We have been told
considerable details about what we are to do, but I shall have to wait
before I can tell you about it all.
We reached the hotel about 11 and were assigned to rooms with the
greatest dispatch and courtesy. I have a most luxurious room and bath.
After lunch I gave some directions to the squad leaders[3] about letting
the nurses do what they wanted the rest of the day, in parties not
larger than four, etc., in order not to be conspicuous, and then I came
upstairs to sit down in quiet and read the paper and rest. I took a nice
little nap and had a perfectly good bath, and a little before five was
telephoned to that Miss Dunlop, the Chief Nurse of No. 10, and a Colonel
J. wished me to come down to tea. I went on down and found Miss D.,
Colonel B., and Colonel J. in the lounge, which was filled with a gay
crowd of people having tea and listening to the orchestra. There were
lots of uniforms, and many limping, bandaged soldiers, and I had my
first heartache over the one-legged young officers.
Pretty soon Colonel J., who is the English member of the R. A. M. C.
(Royal Army Medical Corps) who is to escort us nurses to London
to-morrow, went and brought over to our table a friend of his, a Major
F., also R. A. M. C. This last man was a lean, hollow-eyed man of about
40, who pretty soon got talking, and for the next hour I heard such
tales as I hardly ever thought could be true. He had been a German
prisoner of war for eleven months. On the way to the prison camp he had
been kept in a railway carriage without food or water for three days. At
German towns through which the train passed and where they always
stopped, he said it frequently happened that women in Red Cross uniforms
came to the stations and offered the prisoners cups of tea or milk and
held them to their lips, only to snatch them away again and jeer and
call them “schweinhund.” He told of the treatment in the camps, where
the prisoners in the dead of winter had only the rags of their uniforms
to wear, their great coats had been taken away from them, and they slept
on sacks of straw without even a tent or any kind of a roof over them.
He said he saw men die at the rate of seven a day from starvation. He
said he never in all his hospital experience has seen such emaciation
from either cancer or tuberculosis as he saw among the prisoners there
who were starving. He saw men kiss the shoes of their guards and beg
like babies for bread. Not the British Tommies but some of the other
prisoners did this. The men had no opportunity to wash and no soap.
Their beards and hair hung down to their waists and were alive with
lice. He was in several different prison camps. The final one was one
where he was sent as a punishment for writing a letter of protest to the
American Ambassador. The letter was never delivered, and he was sent to
a camp where he was the only British person among thousands of Russians.
He had complained because parcels sent to prisoners by their friends
were not delivered to them but were allowed to rot and mildew and be
eaten by rats. He was exchanged after eleven months’ torture, he called
it, in January, 1916. He himself had dysentery and scurvy but not
typhus. After he recovered he was put in charge of a hospital ship,
which was recently torpedoed. Of the 600 sick and wounded that he had on
board he lost only 27.
He told of a hospital ship crossing the Channel just behind his ship on
one trip within 500 yards of his ship and of its striking a mine. There
were no wounded on board at the time, but 12 nurses and officers and
crew. One of the destroyers which was convoying his ship went to the
rescue and got alongside the sinking hospital ship and a little French
trawler also got alongside. Nine of the 12 nurses and the men all jumped
and landed on the destroyer, but no sooner were they on that boat than
it also struck a mine and was blown to atoms, and everybody on it and on
the trawler was blown to bits. The three nurses who were in the water
were picked up by Major F--’s boat. He is here in Liverpool fitting up
another hospital ship and will probably be ordered East again to bring
back more wounded.
He asked if Miss Dunlop and I would like to see his ship. Would we? We
got our coats in a jiffy and flew off with him in a taxi to one of the
docks quite a way off. His boat is a big ship that was a passenger ship
between here and South America. He has taken out the cabins and made big
wards and has accommodations for 800 sick or wounded men. I never saw
anything so cleverly done as the way he is making over that ship. He has
a splendid operating room, an X-Ray complete equipment, a steam laundry,
and absolutely everything that a modern big city hospital has. It will
be ready to sail, he said, in ten days, although to us there seemed to
be an enormous amount yet to do. They no longer have women nurses on
the hospital ships.
We came back from the dock by an “overhead” tram and got here about
eight o’clock, although it was as light as four o’clock. Miss Dunlop and
I then went to dinner together. Ruth Cobb and Rachel Watkins (our nice
dietitian) spent the afternoon in Chester and had a wonderful time, they
said. People are so wonderfully nice. The kids on the street salute us,
and people come up and ask if we aren’t American nurses and if they
can’t do something for us, and take nurses to tea and put them on the
proper trams and show them all sorts of courtesies.
I had just come in to start to write, about nine o’clock, when Major
Murphy[4] was announced, and I went down to see him. He had called to
see if there was anything he could do for us and to find out if we were
all right. They are so considerate and good to us. I told him of our
wonderful experience this afternoon, and just then Colonel J. and Major
F. hove in sight and as I wanted Dr. Murphy to hear some of Major F--’s
tales I introduced him, and soon left them, to come up here and write.
It is now almost eleven and Miss Dunlop has been in to tell me the
latest instructions she has received from her Majors. We always have to
compare instructions and see which of us knows the most about what is
going to happen. If we have the same experiences as the nurses of the
two previous Units, we are to be much fêted in London, and are to be
reviewed by the Queen. We have been trying desperately hard on shipboard
to learn how to march and keep step and to right about face without
falling over ourselves, but I fear we won’t be much on looks when it
comes to being reviewed. I trust we are not expected to curtsy. And now
I must hustle to bed, for to-morrow will be an exciting day. Good night
and so much love to you all. If only you were all having this wonderful
experience with me nothing more could be desired.