Rouen, France. July 16, 1917.
I am inclosing a copy of a letter Miss Taylor received to-day, in reply
to the letter she wrote to Private Murphy’s mother, the day after her
boy died here. He was here of a gunshot wound in the chest, one of those
treacherous injuries that seem to be getting along all right and then
knock a man out with a sudden hemorrhage. The boy was not even on the
Seriously Ill or the Dangerously Ill list, and the worst part was that
he died before we could get the priest to him. We have a Catholic priest
as well as C. of E. and Nonconformist padres always in attendance. They
live on the grounds. Of course a formal notice of the man’s death was
sent to his mother through the War Casualty Office, but Miss Taylor
wrote to tell his mother the details, and to explain why the priest was
not with him when he died. Her reply is so typical of the bravery of
English women I want you to see it.
“To Assistant Matron:--
“I thank you for so kindly answering my letter for my dear lad Pte. W.
Murphy. I am quite sure you all concerned did what possibly could be
done for him. I thank you from the very bottom of my heart. I’ve felt it
very keenly, more than I can ever say, but I have the satisfaction of
knowing he was cared for by a woman at the last and given a decent
grave. Perhaps God took him then because he was then fit, he was a good
boy at home to us and I know the last three years of his life he
honestly tried his level best. I think God understands us each one best.
I should like you to thank the nurse personally for me who was with him
at the last, and every night you brave women are remembered in our
prayers. My wee daughter aged three years prays, ‘God bless our nurses
at the front.’ I have not received his treasure bag and am sorry as my
little son aged 15 yrs., who was passionately attached to our dear lad,
hoped to have his rosary, but perhaps I shall get it--only you asked me
to let you know if I did not receive it. I must now conclude, thanking
you once again, believe me
“Yrs. sincerely
“Bell Brown.”
All day yesterday and in the night we heard the booming of guns, and the
night nurses say the windows in our surgical hut rattled. It was the
loudest I have heard since we have been here. And every time I hear them
those words of one of our patients come to my mind: “Some poor devils
are getting theirs.” The men recently sent down from the front tell us
that rumor has it that there is going to be a big drive in a few days.
We wonder if it has begun and if we shall be getting more convoys in.
Our hospital is not half full now, we have been sending out so many
convoys over to “Blighty.” We need to be a little busier for our best
good. The weather is lovely, very cool at night, we always sleep under
blankets, warm in the sun. Almost every day it rains at least a part of
the day, but the ground here is so sandy there is very little mud. It is
a drizzling evening, but it is cozy and pleasant here in my office. It
is getting on toward ten and outside in their tents I can hear the
voices of some of our officers talking together, and from time to time
across the road come bugle calls, and there is that faint bustling sound
of large numbers of people getting ready to be quiet for the night. We
are in the midst of such thousands and thousands of people, mostly
soldiers, and all day long there are myriads of soldier sounds, bugle
calls, tramping of feet, motor cycles, lorries, bands playing, men’s
voices, sharp commands, the slap of the hand on the musket in salute,
the popping of small bombs or guns all day long from the practice
trenches near here. On the fourth of July we thought how like a home
Fourth it was, but here the popping and the shots sound every day. And
it is not fireworks that are being shot off. At neighboring camps there
are experts in bayoneting, experts in gassing, experts in Hate Talk.
There are actually special men who sometimes talk to as many as three
thousand men to make them feel that their chief business is to kill. It
is incomprehensible. Whenever will this toppling world right itself? It
will be a long time before we come home. The more we know the more sure
we are that it is going to be a long business. And the man who wrote
“The picture, That I saw that day, Of home folks bidding home good-by,
For traitor seas, And ‘somewhere,’ Out beyond the seas, And after that,
Just God, And what He wills,” was right. That is the situation.
July 19. Such nice letters to-day. It is such fun to get the home news
and to learn the details of your doings. We are not working hard and we
find it embarrassing to have people take it for granted that we are
overdoing all the time and suffering real hardships. We are comfortable
and well fed and have interesting work and many very interesting
diversions.
There is a lot of very simple entertainment back and forth among the
camps. Once or twice every week there is a tea party or a tennis party
with tea or a concert with refreshments somewhere here. To-morrow we are
going to return some of the many courtesies that have been shown us and
be “at home” to our neighbors here on the Race Course: No. 10 General
Hospital and No. 1 Australian General. The party will be out of doors
and there will be tennis and a baseball game between nurses and
officers. The officers are having baseball suits made for them by the
nurses. These suits are to be very gay _skirts_, so that they will be as
much hampered as the women. We have started our V. A. D.’s on baseball
against the American nurses. They take to it like small boys and find it
“ripping.” It has been the best mixing process I ever invented. It is a
great sight these lovely evenings between eight and nine to see the
crowd of hilarious nurses careering over the grass between the hedge and
the fenced-off center of the course where all the tents are, and hanging
on the fence a couple of hundred “blue boys” or convalescent patients in
their blue hospital suits. Then the officers come straggling out after
their dinner, peacefully smoking their pipes, and they line up and root
and laugh too and coach. It does not look much like war. It does
everybody the best possible good, for it has them all roaring with
laughter, and sends them off to bed in the best of humor, like a bunch
of kids.
The English tea parties are charming, and I think myself in a storybook
every time I go to one. The uniforms of the English Sisters are so gay
and bright with their flowing caps and red-bordered little capes, and
all the men are in uniform, and the little tables set out on the grass
are under large sunshades, or there are special marquees set up for the
occasion, and it’s all very gay. Last week around at No. 10 General
after the tea party, they had games, tennis for some, hunting for hidden
treasure in the grass and hedge (I found a souvenir spoon in a mole
hole), and a potato and spoon race, and also a tug of war that was so
fiercely strenuous that it left many of us with cricks in our necks ever
since. The tug of war seems to be a favorite sport. Our white-dressed
nurses with their scarlet-lined blue capes look mighty pretty on these
occasions. Of course different groups of nurses and doctors get off for
different parties. They are usually from 5 to 7 or after 8.
Then in the Y. M. C. A. huts there are frequent forms of entertainment,
not only for the convalescent patients but for the staff. A “concert”
usually means a kind of variety show. All kinds of pretty good troupes
are sent out to go the rounds of the various hospitals, and then, too,
each hospital has its own band, which is trained or run by the Y. M. C.
A. people. We here have some very unusual Y. M. C. A. people. A Prof.
B., his wife, and son are living here and giving their whole time to
this work. They are from Cambridge, both father and son. I am told that
the father is a professor of theology, and the son of archæology. They
are very talented people, quite eccentric geniuses, all of them, I
should judge. The father leads the band, the son plays the little organ
in our chapel, the mother hovers around, and all the time some one of
them is in attendance at the Y. M. C. A. hut to help the boys play and
to manage the many concerts and lectures that take place there all the
time. The first time I met Mrs. B. was the first night I arrived. The
first thing she said to me was, “Good gracious, how funereal you look!”
I was in my dark uniform and it was after dark in the evening and I did
look like a crow, but then! She was very cordial afterward and has been
very charming to us all. She gave a big tea for us in the hut one Sunday
afternoon and had many officers, Y. M. C. A. workers, and nurses there
to meet us. Everybody here is devoted to the B.’s and they add much to
the community life. Both father and son are tall, thin, stooped,
spectacled souls. The son is more or less of an invalid, it seems.
We have just heard a piece of news that delights us very much and that
is that Miss G. is to come over to be “Matron-in-chief for France” as
the corresponding official is called for the other nursing forces. I had
already written, as had the Chief Nurses of some of the other Units,
asking Miss N. to send us some one to advise us, and make uniform
regulations for us all and standardize our actions and customs. Now,
each Chief Nurse is entirely responsible, under her Commanding Officer,
who leaves all the details to her, for every little thing. And the
consequence is that there are as many ideas about discipline, uniforms,
hours of duty, social usages, etc. as there are Chief Nurses. Miss G.
will be ideal for this position. Dr. Alexander Lambert was here last
evening and he told us that she was coming. It may be that she has only
been sent for, but I hope it means that she is to come. We have received
word that five American nurses are to be added to our force here soon.
We don’t know where they are to come from or anything about them. It was
an official notice that we had yesterday that 33 were to arrive at
Havre, five of whom are to be sent to us. We shall be glad to see them
whoever they are. Five of our V. A. D.’s are to be taken when the
Americans come.
Two of my people heard me say the other day that I wished I had my
violin here, so yesterday they went down to Rouen and bought me one. I
wish you could hear the accounts of how they did it, for neither of them
has any French or knows anything about violins. But it was a violin all
right that they brought out to me wrapped up in a newspaper, and last
night it played perfectly good tunes in the mess hall. One of the V. A.
D.’s plays the piano very well, so we had a fine time trying out the
instrument. To-day I have some bad blisters on the ends of the fingers
of my left hand, which makes it almost impossible to write on the
typewriter. We have not much music here, but a few popular dance airs.
Loads of love.
Julia.
July 25, 1917.
I do not know how to write about our doings of the past few days, for I
cannot write numbers, and it is only numbers that would give you any
idea at all of what we have been doing. I wrote in my last letter, I
think it was, that we were not working hard, well, we have begun our
hard work, and for our own sakes we are glad of it. In the past 24 hours
we have admitted more patients than the total capacity of the Barnes and
Children’s Hospital, not the average number of patients, but the total
capacity. And all these patients have been bathed, fed, and had their
wounds dressed. Some of course were able to walk and could go to the
bath house and the mess tents, but most of them to-day are stretcher
cases, and oh, so dirty, hungry, and miserable. The mere (I say mere,
but it is really the most important part of the whole thing) proper
recording of the names, numbers, ranks, nearest relatives etc., is in
itself a huge task. Of course the nurses don’t have all that to do, but
they have a lot of it. The boys who are stretcher bearers must be so
lame, they can hardly move, for just consider what it means to lift down
out of ambulances as many patients as that, and then afterwards carry
them as far sometimes as a city block, for we filled our farthest tents
to-day. It is most remarkable how things have gone. There are many
aching backs to-night, for all the beds are very low and the stooping is
terrific, but every one has been a brick. Many of the nurses have worked
14 straight hours to-day, and many of the doctors had only two or three
hours’ sleep last night, and were working all day. The difficulty to-day
was, that we had to put patients into rows of tents that have not been
used for some time and were not equipped, and our warning was not long
enough to prepare. We had the beds ready, but little else. To-night
things have straightened out a lot, but it is going to be a busy night
as we are to send out a convoy, and get another in. Three additional
night nurses are on to-night, taken from the day force that has to
stretch itself a little thinner.
Our nurses don’t need any “Hate Lecture” after what we have seen in the
past few days. We have been receiving patients that have been gassed,
and burned in a most mysterious way. Their clothing is not burned at
all, but they have bad burns on their bodies, on parts that are covered
by clothing. The doctors think it has been done by some chemical that
gets its full action on the skin after it is moist, and when the men
sweat, it is in these places that are the most moist that the burns are
the worst. The Germans have been using a kind of oil in bombs, the men
say it is oil of mustard. These bombs explode and the men’s eyes, noses,
and throats are so irritated they do not detect the poison gas fumes
that come from the bombs that follow these oil ones, and so they either
inhale it and die like flies, or have a delayed action and are affected
by it terribly several hours later. We have had a lot of these
delayed-action gassed men, who cough and cough continuously, like
children with whooping cough. We had a very bad case the other night who
had not slept one hour for four nights or days, and whose coughing
paroxysms came every minute and a half by the clock. When finally the
nurses got him to sleep, after rigging up a croup tent over him so that
he could breathe steam from a croupkettle over a little stove that
literally had to be held in the hands to make it burn properly, they
said they were ready to get down on their knees in gratitude, his
anguish had been so terrible to watch. They said they could not wish the
Germans any greater unhappiness than to have them have to witness the
sufferings of a man like that and know that they had been the cause of
it. It is diabolical the things they do, simply fiendish, and like the
things that would be expected from precocious degenerates.
I cannot imagine what kind of change is going to take place in our minds
before we get home. There are so many changes coming over our ideas
every day. They are not new ideas, for many people have had them before,
since the beginning of this war, but they are new to us. Human life
seems so insignificant, and individuals are so unimportant. No one over
here thinks in any numbers less than 50 or 100, and what can the serious
condition of Private John Brown of something or other, Something Street,
Birmingham, matter? One’s mind is torn between the extremes of such
feelings, for when a nurse takes the pulse of a wounded sleeping man and
he wakes just enough to say “Mother,” she goes to pieces in her heart,
just as though he weren’t only one of the hundreds of wounded men in
just this one hospital.
This morning when the big rush was on, I was in the receiving tent when
the last three men were unloaded: One had his head and eyes all bandaged
up and seemed in very bad condition, so I went with the stretcher
bearers to see if I could help get him into bed. The eye specialist was
sent for at once, and got there in a few minutes. We untied the big
triangular bandage that was keeping the wads of cotton on his head and
eyes, and found his eyes in a terrible condition from being bandaged for
over 24 hours without attention. We soaked off the dressings with some
boric solution that I had procured from the Operating Hut. There was not
even a single basin in the tent to which the man had been brought, not
to mention a nurse or medicines. After a while we got the eyes open a
tiny bit so that they could be examined and washed out a little, and
then the doctor blew out: “It’s a perfect crime to send a man down here
in this condition, look at this puncture wound of this eye, and see what
a terrible condition his eyes are in. A whole lifetime of blindness will
probably be the result.” The patient was delirious and quite incapable
of understanding. Just then an older officer came along and heard the
remark and said: “Crime! my dear boy, you’ve got absolutely the wrong
point of view. How could they keep a man like this up there at the
front, from which they have sent him? Don’t you realize that at a place
like that every wounded man is simply a hindrance and must be gotten out
of the way? Just stop and think how well they are doing to get so many
of them to us in any decent shape at all.” Then the other one said:
“Oh, I suppose so. War’s the thing now, all right.” After he was
dressed, and things had been straightened out a bit, this patient was
transferred to one of the lines that is better equipped to take care of
such serious cases. He was put on the “Dangerously Ill,” and word was
sent to his mother! His head injury is bad, so maybe he wont live to be
blind. (Later. He is much better now and will get well and probably have
the sight of one eye.)
No man leaves here in his own clothes. It couldn’t be done. All the
things have to be sent to be disinfected and then they go to the clothes
tent, and then are just drawn, as clothes for so many men, when the
convoys go out. That is unless they are going to the Convalescent Camp
or back to a base, then they are fitted as nearly as possible and given
a full equipment, but the men going to England are fixed up just so that
they can travel. They are lucky if they can stick to their little
comfort bags in which are their little treasures. Just so many pins that
must have so many moves is all they are. And they are so good and
patient. They are so grateful, it just makes everybody wish she were a
dozen people and could do twelve times as much as she can possibly do
with her one set of arms and legs.
But what will we think when we get through with it all? How are we
going to stand the mental strain? Yet others do, and go on being normal,
cheerful human beings, teaching bayoneting one hour, and playing tennis
the next, or having tea with pretty nurses. Oh, it’s a queer world! as
the orderly said who came to tell me of a few more hundred wounded
expected in soon. “Isn’t it a cruel world?”
July 30, 1917.