Good-night, good-night, dear ones,
Julia.
Dec. 15, 1917.
My little Corona has come back from London where it went to be cleaned
and I feel as though an old and dear friend had come back. It’s a cold
Saturday night. Up in the Mess nurses are making Christmas stockings,
one thousand of them, so that they can be filled with all kinds of nice
little things that we are receiving from all over the country, and be
given, one to each man on Christmas morning. It really is quite a job
for each nurse to make ten stockings, but they are getting done. The
hospital is not quite so heavy as it has been very steadily all autumn,
and temporarily, at least, the pressure has let up a bit. I have sent
five nurses away on leave. After six months’ service each nurse is
entitled to 15 days’ leave with pay, but up to now we have not been
able to spare the nurses, for we have always a few who are sick. I have
six sick ones over in the Sick Sisters’ Hospital now, but if things stay
as they are now, I won’t have to send for the ones who are on leave. My
sick ladies are not very sick. One has an infected finger, another an
infected big toe, and the others have slight fevers, or very bad colds
which are really the grippe. It is such a blessing that we have such a
splendid place to send our sick nurses.
To-night I want to tell you a bit about gifts and givers. All the mail
for the nurses has to be brought to my office to be sorted again: some
to be forwarded to English sisters or V. A. D.’s who have left, some to
be taken out to be brought up to the Sick Sisters, some to be put away
until those on leave return, and some to be hunted up on lists and
forwarded if possible. A man brings the papers and packages in large
sacks. Sometimes there have been three or four sacks full on the same
day. He empties them on the floor and Miss Taylor and I sort it out. I
wish you could see what we have had here on the floor. There have been
jam, coffee beans, and pounds of ground coffee, lump sugar and
granulated sugar, cocoa and chocolate by the pound, hard candies and
soft candies, cookies, and fruit cake, chewing-gum, cigarettes, woolen
underwear, shoes, knitted things, magazines without wrappings or
covers, bits of glass bottles, letters without envelopes, talcum
powder, Christmas cards “with love from Aunt Mary,” “Merry Christmas and
don’t forget me,” from John H. Jones, Jr., Kansas City, or Roanoke, Va.,
and toothpaste. You just ought to see what a tube of pink toothpaste can
do to a bag of mail, but the worst of all were the jam and the talcum
powder. You would not believe that a large can of Colgate’s talcum
powder could break right in two, but I have seen two of them broken
clean through the middle. And as for the comfort bags for soldiers, you
ought to see the way some of those have arrived, sans paper, sans
string, together just because the things were in a bag and the address
was tied to the bag string. Cardboard boxes never arrive intact. Tin
containers get stove in. (I don’t know the past participle of that word,
maybe it’s _stiven_.) If a tin box with sharp edges is nicely wrapped in
paper, it is apt to arrive without the paper, which the sharp edges have
worn through. Even wooden boxes are frequently broken. Everything is
crushed and then of course the strings come off and the contents begin
to shake out. The long, long journey is what does the damage, the many
weeks of rubbing and shaking. A five-pound box of Maillard’s candy
packed in a round tin box, arrived for me the other day without the
cover of the tin box and with the cover of the inside box broken, the
candy just protected by the tinfoil inside. But not a piece was missing.
There really have been very few instances where we have not been able to
identify the person for whom the package was meant, but sometimes, I can
assure you it has taken considerable ingenuity.
The British and the Australians have discovered that the best way to
insure the arrival intact of any article is to put it in a box and then
sew it up in cloth. If it gets mashed or jammed or “stove in,” the
contents are very likely to remain inside the cloth covering. Just
ordinary heavy unbleached muslin does beautifully. I’d hate to have Dad
know how his lovely electric pad arrived, or E. her pretty brown
bed-jacket. Magazines and papers should be rolled and wrapped and tied
around and through. The parcel post is the quickest and safest and
entirely the most convenient way for us to receive things. For express
packages we have to go to town and usually pay charges, even if they
have been paid before. And express is very slow.
People are sending us wonderful things. We really are being too awfully
spoiled and are getting so much more than we deserve. Fortunately lots
of people are sending us things for our patients’ Christmas, which is
what we like best of all. But oh the acknowledging! I really am so
swamped with the list I have already made of strangers to whom I must
write, I have decided to use a regular form letter and have Simone write
this for me on the typewriter. I am sure people will forgive me; they
would if they knew what a lot I have to write and how little free time I
really have. Here in the office daytimes there are things to be done
every minute. I have been trying for a week to get my accounts ready to
be audited, just merely to put the receipts by months, and I have not
had a chance till late this afternoon, and then I was interrupted a
dozen times, once to take a sister of a very sick patient down to the
lines to see him. She had just come from England. On the way down she
said, “My, but this is different to London, but give me London.” Other
times I had to stop to give knitted caps to nurses. I have just had some
made here in Rouen. Another time it was to help a Y. M. C. A. worker
look up a patient’s record, another time to let a little night nurse
tell me about a patient who had died on her line last night, and how he
had said to her, “Sister, stay with me,” and she had sat beside him and
held his hand, and how she wouldn’t have missed this opportunity of
working with the English for anything in the world, and although she has
a cough which hangs on pretty long she is feeling fine and well and just
loves night duty here, the nights are so wonderful, and last night the
searchlights on the clouds were most beautiful and gave one such a
feeling of protection. She’s a little, slender, 25-year old Virginian
with such a pretty speech. Such are the constant interruptions, but they
are of course what I am here for, just such interruptions.
And now I want to tell you a little about givers. To begin with, there
was an old lady in an Old Ladies’ Home in St. Louis who wrote to ask if
she might make for me and my patients some bookmarks with verses on
them. Of course I wrote back that she could. After a while along came a
box of about a dozen long ribbon bookmarks, all the colors of the
rainbow, with cross-stitched verses on them like “God is love,” “Be of
good cheer.” I got a wounded soldier that I knew pretty well to write
her the best note of thanks he knew how, and I have since heard from her
that she received his letter and felt fully rewarded for her pains. The
padre said he would help distribute some of them. I saw the soldier’s
letter. It was quite typical and was full of such expressions as “fed up
with,” “carry on,” “stick it,” “Blighty,” etc., and I am sure would be a
real object of interest and curiosity at the Old Ladies’ Home!
Then there was the King’s Daughters of Pilgrim Church, dear kind people,
who sent 40 lbs. of sweet chocolate to Ruth and me, also I don’t know
how many pounds of coffee. The chocolate was in four ten-pound cakes:
delicious chocolate about two feet long, a foot wide, and two inches
thick, Hershey’s. We’ve given it away in hunks. Nobody in all the world
ever saw such cakes of chocolate. We pounded it up, or rather cracked it
up with a hammer, and many people enjoyed it. R. never can have too
much. I have another 5 lbs. of sweet chocolate unopened as yet
(Maillard’s), put away for the time when rations fail us. There is also
a three-pound box of Chicago candy in storage on my shelf. We’ll eat it
all after a while, you may be sure. Then the fruit cakes, such wonders.
Mr. C. sent some simply perfect ones to both R. and me, and I have
another from Scruggs in St. Louis being saved. People are so dear. Mrs.
H.’s box of salted nuts, dates, and raisins struck a most popular chord,
they were such good things. A dear Jewish lady in St. Louis who hardly
knew me at all sent a box of cookies and little cakes, which didn’t
arrive in very good condition, as they were all in crumbs, but wasn’t it
kind of her? We feel like missionaries getting barrels. The Sorosis
Carol Club’s comfort bags have been coming and coming. They are now
stacked up in my sitting-room waiting till Christmas, when they are
going to give lots of pleasure to sick boys, who are so much like little
children. Think of a whole tent-full of men howling to have some powder
put on their backs because a nurse had just put some on a very sick
man’s back when she was rubbing his back for him. I have a letter to-day
that the St. Louis Comforts Committee of the U. S. Navy League is
sending us 100 wristlets. Well, we can use them.
It is snowing to-day (Sunday the 16th) and you can’t imagine how lovely
the camp looks. It is very cold. But I think all my people are warmly
enough dressed. They are funny-looking nurses and not much like the
fancy pictures of nurses, as they paddle around to-day. They have on
round, blue, tight-fitting knitted caps, sweaters, and wristlets, gray
dresses and aprons. Some have on their rain-coats and rubber boots, and
some have on leather gaiters and heavy boots. They all have
knickerbockers under their uniforms, and some, I know, have knitted
sleeveless Jimmy shirts on top of two sets of underwear. But they are as
happy as can be and make all sorts of fun about being sewed up for the
winter and not needing to brush their hair if they keep their little
caps on both night and day, as many do.
Getting up in the mornings is great. The fires have just been started
and have not heated things up a bit and frost is all over everything,
and it is a real stunt to get dressed. Over in the Mess at breakfast
sometimes the nurses eat with gloves on. But soon the two little stoves
warm things up, and groups gather around each fire to make toast, “just
to get the frost out of the bread,” as one said this morning. Then they
bundle up and go chattering down to the lines to look after their boys.
The tents are really quite cozy when they are shut up tight, but the air
in them gets very bad. The night nurses have the hardest time because
they can’t move around so much and they find it hard to keep warm, but
the Night Supervisors make hot cocoa and toast for them in the Night
Duty Hut over their little stove there, and give each nurse a chance to
get warmed up about four o’clock in the morning. They have a hot supper
in the Hut at midnight. We have a big basket of food sent down from the
Mess each evening and one nurse who is “Jane” for a week at a time
prepares it and makes coffee. It is no end primitive, for they have no
running water and just a tiny stove and an oil lamp, but I bought some
pretty dishes for them and they seem to enjoy their night suppers very
much. When the doctors operate late, they drop in for a bite too. Many,
many nights the nurses have scarcely a moment in which to eat. They
can’t always be relieved by a supervisor or another nurse, and may have
to leave their lines in charge of the orderly while they go to eat. But
almost every nurse likes night duty, the nights are so beautiful and so
varying and the experiences are so vivid.
But to go back to gifts and givers. The packages for soldiers are
waiting to go into stockings. The Washington University nurses sent such
nice boxes to all of us W. U. people,--sleeveless sweaters, bed socks,
nuts, candies, and nut cake, with coffee and chocolate. A stranger who
had heard some of my letters is sending a gramophone. Magazines and
notes and cards galore come all the time. People are so good. And we are
just being spoiled. We have heard of lots of other things on the way. I
am just worried that I will neglect to make a note of some of these
things that come and the kind giver won’t know how much pleasure and
happiness the gift has brought.
I suppose most of you have read Donald Hankey’s book “A Student in
Arms.” We have had a lot of discussion about the chapter called
“Discipline and Leadership.” The Major says he has changed his point of
view entirely since he has been in the army, and now he agrees with the
book entirely. I have not reached that point as yet. I am sure that I
must be wrong, but I can’t get away from the feeling that you can do the
most with people when you appeal to the best in them, and don’t insist
on discipline for discipline’s sake. Army life is altogether different
from civilian life, and what held there does not hold here. But in my
dealings with the nurses I am probably on the wrong tack, and will
undoubtedly come a cropper before we get back because my discipline has
not been rigid enough, and I’ve been getting results because of my
“personality” rather than because of my “orders.” It is an interesting
matter for discussion.
This letter has grown to be very long because it has rambled all over
the field. It must call a halt now, for soon it will be time to have
supper, then practise hymns for Christmas Eve.