Part 11

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.

J.

Dec. 28, 1917.

The wind is swirling and howling outside and it is very cold, about the coldest day we’ve had, I think. I have put a little table over nearer the stove than my big desk-table is and here a couple of feet away from the fire, the heat is quite noticeable. It’s an amusing sight to see Miss Taylor and me doing our work down here mornings with mittens on. With those nice fingerless ones, we can typewrite or write most comfortably. It’s the wind that is making things so cold this evening. Not that it has been warm on the days when there was no wind, for it has been for over two weeks that some fire buckets in my sitting-room have been solid ice. Useful in case of fire, I can hear some one say. Yes, but to-day some chemical fire extinguishers, that I have been making a big howl for, have arrived upon the scene and I shall sleep more peacefully, for our huts are like match-boxes. Every morning the water in our pitchers is frozen and the ink in fountain pens. We have to jerk our tooth-brushes out of the glasses and pry the soap off of the soap-dishes. In the Mess, our drinking-water bottles have ice in them, like the Waldorf. There is one story that some believe and some don’t, but the nurse swears it is true, and that is--that her hot-water bottle was frozen solid in the morning in her bed. I asked about it and learned that it had been placed outside her sleeping bag and had slipped down to the foot of the bed where the blankets were loose, but it was frozen. It is most amusing the howls one hears in the mornings; it is so hard to get up. The fires don’t get things warmed up a bit, for a long time, and it is like getting up out of doors. We all have schemes about how to dress at night so that dressing in the morning will necessitate the least exposure and the least changing. It is awfully funny and doesn’t hurt us a bit. The chilblains hurt and are awful, but heroic treatment helps. There are parades of barefoot ladies who go and walk in the snow nights, then come in and rub and roar; then there are the cold-water foot baths, which are said to be worse than the snow treatment. Occasionally a day or two off duty is necessary for very bad hands or feet. Almost everybody wears two pairs of woolen stockings and monstrous shoes, and oh! the money that is being spent on having shoes made to order--very high ones with extra thick soles. But on the whole a stranger would think our group looks mighty fat and well. There are a lot of coughs that hang on. To-day, for instance, out of my 99 women, I have just three off duty sick,--one has an infected thumb; another an infected toe; and the third, poor dear, has been having a painful attack. But at home in steam-heated apartments, we could not do better than that. Some dear lambs walk with a good deal of a limp when they first go on duty in the mornings, but as the days progress their feet feel better. I have been awfully lucky, though I came near getting some trouble started. I walked downtown with Major Veeder last Sunday, when we were going down to dinner, and that night the balls of my feet and the heels got very burning and swollen, but vigorous treatment stopped the trouble.

This is a very quiet Sunday--Dec. 30th, 1917,--and every nurse is having a full half day off duty. We have over eight hundred patients, but there are not so very many that are desperately sick. I want to tell you all about our wonderful Christmas and I hope I won’t be much disturbed, for I am in the office, as Miss Taylor is off duty. The nurses and doctors, helped by a few home gifts, raised about $600 to be spent for Christmas. About $200 of that, it was decided, was to go to some Rouen charity for children. So one cold day, Major Murphy, Major Veeder, and I went to look up the names of some philanthropic organizations that had been given us by the Mayor. I forgot to say that the first move was a call that Major Veeder and I made on the Mayor to get a list of the accredited charities. You would have been amused and proud (?) to hear me explain in slow and careful French who we were and what we wanted. But I got it over, and the list was sent us with many respectful salutations. When we visited some of the societies on the list, we had a most interesting time. We three would take turns in speaking the French and explaining what we wanted. We’d rehearse on the front door steps like so many kids. We visited a refuge for little boys--such a poor, bare place, managed by a priest and some sisters; then a sort of industrial school; then the office of the Society for the care of war orphans. Here we got the names of ten families to which we could send special New Year’s baskets. We decided to give something to each of these societies, and, in all, spend about $200. There has been lots of fun about the baskets, for the doctors auctioned off the privilege of having a family, and with each family there went the name of a nurse who was to help. Many of the families got visited yesterday, and baskets of clothes and toys and food were purchased, and on New Year’s morning, they are going to be delivered.

Then for our patients, we bought pork, extra, for their dinner, and beer. The English Government sent them plum puddings. We wanted turkey or chicken, but found we could not afford it for so many. But they loved the pork. We had been making fancy Christmas stockings for days, and a committee, of which Ruth Cobb was chairman, had been having a very bad time trying to buy and get delivered enough supplies to fill them. There had been great fun filling them. We had requisitioned all the candy and cigarettes we could from the officers, and we got them to help fill, so by Christmas Eve, when we had about 750 filled, we thought we were quite safe, as a great many patients had been sent out, but that evening we were notified to be prepared to receive two convoys of a hundred each, during the night. The Committee almost wept, but they got very busy and by 10 o’clock on Christmas morning every patient in the hospital had received a stocking with fruit, tobacco, candies, nuts, and some kind of a present in it. Only one of the convoys had arrived by noon--the other one got delayed somewhere. The patients were just like little boys with their stockings, and the nurses had just as much fun with them as though they had been. The one-armed men could not untie the necks of their stockings, which had to be tied up tight, and so their shouts all through those tents: “Oh, Sister, come and snip mine next.” The Sisters dashed around, snipping and untying and pulling snappers and fitting on paper caps. The British Red Cross sent us a lot of decorations and things we could use for the stockings, and the Australian Red Cross gave some money as did the American Red Cross. The boxes the St. Louis Chapter of the American Red Cross sent for the Unit have not arrived yet.

Now about the singing on Christmas Eve, which was the loveliest part of the whole Christmas to me. At 8:15 about 50 bundled-up nurses left the quarters and walked down across the snow, each carrying her candle lantern. It was the loveliest sight, for the night was perfect. It was not too cold and the snow made everything so bright. I had my violin to start them with and keep them on the key. We began at one corner of the camp and just as soon as we had started we were joined by all the officers and a number of the enlisted men, and soon up-patients gathered around too, so as we went from place to place between the lines of tents we must have been a crowd of over 200 people. I wish you could have seen what I saw. I knew the tunes so well I could watch the others as I played. Officers and nurses, and patients and nurses looking together over one sheet of words (we had had the words mimeographed, for we have only two hymn books of the same kind), while one of them held the lantern so that the light fell on the paper. And all were singing so intently and so happily. One group of patients, who said they wanted to learn those “Yankee tunes,” pushed and shoved to be by me every time because they said they wanted to be near the “band.” We sang--“Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful.” That everybody knew; and “Hark, the Herald Angels,” and “It Came upon the Midnight Clear,” and “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Holy Night, Silent Night.” We sang in eight places. It is something I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred, and I imagine a good many felt the same way. If there only were some other way we could have community singing. There is nothing like it. I was worn to a frazzle afterwards, but it was worth any amount of effort. The night nurses said the patients loved it, only there was not enough of it, though we sang for an hour and a half all together.

After the singing we in our hut had a little hut party. We had a little Christmas tree, with fool presents on it for each one of us with a rhyme. You don’t know what lovely tree decorations can be made out of the silver-foil out of candy boxes; a bit of gilt fringe which was carefully raveled was a great find. We had a nice little family party, ending with cocoa and little cookies; then parted for the night. At midnight Ruth and I went with a group of the Catholic nurses over across the road to the midnight service in their chapel.

Christmas night we had a party in our Mess for just our American officers and nurses. The Mess had been beautifully decorated with holly and greens and we had our dinner early (4 and 5), so that all the tables could be taken out and a stage set. Three or four of the doctors and a couple of nurses acted a little burlesque which they adapted from something they saw in _Punch_. It was full of local hits and was very amusing and clever. Then we had a monologue by another of the doctors, which was very good; then some songs by another doctor. Do you know “Joan of Arc, They are Calling You”? That was one of them. Then came the “Army Alphabet” written by two of the nurses and read by me. It wound up with a scene about “U is us as we used to be” and gave a chance for a bunch of pretty girls to dress up in mufti, and how pretty they did look after all this somber uniform stuff. They had a little business about going to say good-by to a friend of theirs who was just off for France as a nurse, then when I got to--

“Y’s for the years and years till we’ve done, When we’ve healed every Tommy and killed every Hun, Then old and decrepit and wrinkled and gray, To America’s shores we’ll wend our way. They set dogs on old ‘Rip’-- He was gone twenty years-- Oh, what will they do-- When this Unit appears?”

Then they had a scene to show how we would appear. It was killingly funny and brought down the house. Then we wound up with a dance. Lots of the group said it was the nicest Christmas they could possibly imagine. I was so glad, for it might have been so different, for Christmas is a lonesome time and nobody had time to be lonesome here. We have not had any mail for ages. Some packages came through the week before Christmas, but I have had no letters from the States since those that came written about November 24th. We keep hoping every day that a big batch will arrive.

All the hospitals around us are entertaining a lot this week. They are having “at homes” or concerts or little plays, and there seems to be something doing every afternoon or evening. It is an awfully good thing, and I really suppose we ought to give some sort of an affair here, but how I don’t want to!

Now good night and loads and loads of love to you all, you very dear ones. The Red Cross card Mother sent nearly broke me up,--especially what she wrote on the back.

Jule.

January 22, 1918.