Part 13

It is such heavenly weather here and things are so beautiful. Everything is quiet and happy and peaceful here with us though our work seems to be increasing pretty steadily. I cannot help feeling more or less agitated inside, for I know that an order to leave this Unit and go to Paris may come any minute. When the order actually arises, there is not going to be anything but approval, I think, among my nurses as far as my action and my duty go--for they’ll know this is an _order_ and not a choice in any way--but there is going to be a bad time when it comes to parting. I dread it fearfully, for I know they all care for me and won’t want me to go from a personal point of view, and I shall feel dreadfully about leaving them. We have all been through so much together we feel very close. Same way about the officers. I shall hate to leave them. But it is coming. Phil won’t like it either.

Such is life in the army!

Loads of love, Jule.

March 25, 1918.

This typewriter is almost hot, it has been worked so hard to-day. I think Miss Taylor and I have written over forty Dangerously Ill and Seriously Ill letters to-day, from which you may infer that we are busy. We are busier than we have ever been before. I am snatching a few moments while the day and night shifts change to tell you a little about things, then in a little while I must go down to the lines and see how things are and send off to bed the many day nurses I am sure to find on duty still. The nurses all hate so terribly to go off when there are so many things remaining to be done, but I cannot have them working both day and night, for in a few days, if they keep that up, they won’t be able to work at all. No one has had a minute “off duty” for five days now and they are beginning to show it, but they have got to keep this up for a while longer and so I drive them off with many things left undone. Of course there are always night nurses to go on with the work, but they are usually only one to a hut or line, where in the day-time there may have been four or five.

Our excitement began last Thursday the 21st with an order that for all ranks Rouen was to be “Out of Bounds.” This was because they had Smallpox there. We have maids, French teachers, stenographers, and sewing-women coming back and forth every day and things looked complicated--and were. But only for a while. Everybody was vaccinated, and the important civilians were given daily passes, and so our work goes on about as usual. I made temporary arrangements for four maids to stay here on the grounds with us.

That very day we were given an hour’s warning in getting our next team off for a Clearing Station. The people had been designated but they were not packed. You never saw any woman packed in more double-quick time than our dear nurse was. We have been a bit worried about her ever since she left, for disquieting reports of great activity in her vicinity have been coming to us every day since she left. She has six good American men to look after her, which is a comforting thought to us.

That day patients began to pour in upon us. We were told to be prepared to receive unlimited numbers. Well, they have been coming. Day before yesterday we operated on fifty cases, yesterday fifty-one, to-day they had seventy-three scheduled. I have just been down on the lines and to the operating-room. You would not believe me if I told you how that place looks. They have at least forty more cases to operate on to-night. Both the day and the night shifts of nurses are there, but the day shift promises to go up in an hour. As more convoys are due to-night, there may be even more to be operated upon than are scheduled. The doctors are about dead. They are working in shifts as much as they can. The stretcher-bearers are dead tired, but as cheerful as monkeys. I was just at the “Point,” where ambulances are loaded and unloaded, and a convoy of stretcher cases was just going out to be shipped to England, I think. Our American boys were jollying the Tommies who were on the stretchers, and it all sounded so cheerful.

It is not so cheerful when the convoys come in. Last night we had a convoy come in that seemed to be all D. I. cases, many were too badly off to be operated on. It still makes one sick at the stomach to read on a man’s card: “Gun-shot wound, face, chest and right arm, amputation both legs.” Major Fischel has just been in to say that since there must be two hundred “walking wounded” ready to go out by ten A.M. he wants to know if I can have nurses to help dress their wounds early in the morning. I said “Yes, if he meant by early, 7:30” because I wanted the nurses to have something to eat before the start. Seven-thirty will do, so 200 walkers who came in to-day will have fresh dressings put on their injuries and be ready to be shipped along at ten.

So it goes. We have no time for sore vaccinated arms, but fortunately I have heard of only one that is sore so far. People are such bricks under pressure like this. It is perfectly marvelous. I cannot say how glad I am that we managed to give every nurse a whole day off a week or so ago; they certainly needed any reserve strength they could store up. Two nurses just got back from leave in Paris this evening. For the past three days they have been bombed and raided. Most of the past three nights they have spent in cellars. But they have had a wonderful vacation and are so glad to get back. We need them here all right. All leaves for all ranks are now stopped until further notice. I don’t see Phil at all these days, for he too is très occupé. He was here a minute to-day and left mother’s letter of Feb. 28, but I did not see him as I had dashed down town in the Ford (with special duty pass) to do some necessary banking and to get some Carrel tubing from the British Red Cross stores. Our supply is exhausted and new lots have not come through and we are using it by the mile. I got some, and other necessary things too.

You ought to see the way we are using up supplies. But so far we seem to have enough of the necessities. We have long since ceased to attempt to change sheets between patients. A good many patients have been in beds without sheets at all, but that is a minor matter. Major Fischel just gave me a guess on the number of patients we have taken in or sent out to-day. I said five hundred, and he replied, “nearly double that.” We have taken in and sent out all day long, and to show the spirit of the men, Major F. repeated the remark of the head Sergeant of the records, who said he wished we could get in a few more before midnight so that he could say it had been over a thousand. It is a stupendous piece of work and it all goes so smoothly. Now I must go to bed for I am weary, but first I must see about the nurses for the morning.

It is the next evening now and we are waiting for the Night Supervisors to come to get the evening report and to be told the arrangements for the night. Things have been keeping up the same way ever since last evening. Only, two of our men have died and we were so glad to have them die. The sister of the man with the double amputation has arrived from England after such a rough, cold trip. We have had a case of diphtheria develop to-day among the nurses and she has been sent off to the contagious hospital, where Phil will probably have charge of her. She had a throat yesterday and we isolated her until a report from her throat-culture could be obtained. Of course we are taking cultures from the “contacts,” but hope there will be no more positives. Still no bad arms from the vaccinations!

The men tell such dreadful stories and are so glad to get into bed and to be made clean. Often we cannot get them bathed even the least little bit before they have to be taken to the operating room, but we try to wash them up as soon as possible. Just think of the problem of hot water to bathe five or six hundred patients in a camp where all the hot water has to be heated on camp stoves after being drawn from about a single pipe. The “walking wounded” are so pathetic. They go limping off to the tents to which they have been assigned, leaning on each other and helping each other all they can. A nurse told me a few minutes ago that one of her incoming patients who walked in was a young boy who had had his right arm amputated four days ago! Another one said he had had nothing to eat but cigarettes and tea for four days! Another with an amputated arm was so troubled to have a sister bathe and shave and shampoo him. She is a crackerjack at shaving, and all the orderlies are carrying stretchers. But oh, she was so glad to make him clean and comfortable. Our dietitian, Miss Watkins, is doing regular nursing work and doing it so well. One of the nurses told me that before Miss W. gave her first bath she said, “Now, I’ll just pretend that this is my brother.” She takes temperatures and pulses and bathes and feeds but does not do dressings yet. She is so fine, but says she does not ever want to go back to cooking. Here are the night people, and I must stop. I have been down to the camp since I started to write.

Much, much love,

J.

April 6, 1918.

I last wrote on March 25th, and now it is nearly two weeks later. Our rush has kept steadily up until day before yesterday. Yesterday was the very first day in two weeks that any nurse had any time off duty. Yesterday, because of reënforcements that arrived, we were able to send every nurse off to rest for three hours. It was the most extraordinary Easter anybody ever spent. For two nights before we had over two hundred patients sleeping on the benches on the grand stands. These were “walking wounded,” but wounded, you will notice. On one of those days we had over fifteen hundred patients. We never kept any “walkers”; they were sent right on to the Convalescent Camps, where they were able to expand more. We dressed every case here, though, before they were sent on. We certainly found out not only what we can do in an emergency, but what the British Army system can do. We are constantly marveling at the efficiency, speed, and lack of waste with which the English manage their business.

We all physically were so hard pushed Major Murphy wired for help, and just a day before this lull we received a mobile Unit from the A. E. F., fifteen nurses and thirty-odd enlisted men. You may be sure we were glad to get them, though fifteen nurses were just lost in the shuffle and did not seem to make the slightest difference. They all were very young, inexperienced, little things from Kentucky, who had only recently landed and had not seen a patient since they had been over. Some of them are only twenty-one (the age limit has been lowered; it was twenty-five when we left) and have only been out of a training-school a very short time, and had only been in very small Kentucky hospitals. So it seemed a heart-breaking thing to thrust them into this unbelievable hell of a hospital.

Such a baptism of fire as they got that first afternoon! I tried to prepare them all I could, but no words could convey anything like the reality to their inexperienced minds. It was pouring when they came at 12:30 A.M. (and me to meet them here, and feed them, and find them a place to sleep with a half-hour’s notice of their coming!) and it was pouring rain the next afternoon when the Supervisor started off with the little rubber-coated-and-hatted group to drop one here and another there according to assignments we had made here in the office. A little later I had occasion to go down in the lines, and I looked in one of the huts just to see what the little new thing looked like. Just before I got to the hut a little procession had come out of the door. First two of our men carrying a stretcher covered with a Union Jack, then a second stretcher also covered by a flag, then our Supervisor walking behind accompanying them to the mortuary. People along the line stood rigidly at attention as they passed, and saluted. Then I went into the hut. The odor that hit me as I entered was terrific, for most of the cases in this hut have penetrating chest wounds which drain. The little nurse was standing by the stove stirring something in a cup on it with a spoon. She was green-white and looked utterly nauseated. I did not dare speak to her, for fear she would lose any control she had left, so I told the weary head nurse to be as gentle with the little thing as she could and try to realize what she was going through.

That evening I spoke to their group for about ten minutes and told them that it was not going to be like this always, and about the mitigations and the happy part of it all. Then I asked them if, after all, this was not what they had come for, and weren’t they glad they were here. A most sincere response made me feel that they would be all right soon. Like all young things, they are adjusting wonderfully and are already making themselves felt, and are going about as chipper and happy as monkeys. But oh, the poor little dears, they will never forget that first day.

The night after these fifteen arrived another contingent appeared at 1:15 A.M. in the pouring rain! This time I had known it about three hours, but at that time of night there was very little I could do to make preparation, for I simply insisted that my poor tired nurses should not be disturbed. I lay on my bed part of the evening, but as a nurse was sick and I had to get Major Fischel for her, it was not for long. When they arrived, weary and miserable, I fed them hot soup, made from bouillon cubes that some kind person had sent us, and gave them bread and cheese and jam, and then put them to bed in the night nurses’ beds in their separate huts. They could not even have a wash, but they said they did not care, all they wanted was sleep.

These poor souls had been ordered to leave their Unit that morning with a couple of hours’ notice only and were sent off in several different directions, fifteen to us here and fifteen to the Cleveland hospital up the road and somewhere else. Naturally they are the homesickest, bluest group of nurses you ever saw. You can just imagine how we would feel if we were suddenly ordered to scatter. The reason for their scattering is pretty obvious to us here, but I cannot write about it. These nurses are a real help, for they have been in a busy British hospital as long as we have and they are all experienced, well-trained nurses. But how they are all hating us at present. For my ways are not their Matron’s ways and everything about this hospital is far inferior to theirs. I have seen their hospital and they are right in lots of ways. Their former quarters were far superior to ours, and of course all these last comers are having only make-shift quarters. We have erected three marquees for them, but they are pretty dreary. They have no lights but lanterns as yet, and their luggage has just come and some of it has been lost, and it rains, and you can see the picture. They will settle down pretty soon, and my people are being as kind as they can be to them and are trying not to mind their grumbling. I tell them they would grumble worse if the positions were reversed, or I don’t know anything about them.

Well, so much for the war, except that to-day we have had no convoys in and are catching our breaths. I cannot tell you the details of the days that have passed since I last wrote. There were so many deaths and so many awful cases and such pitiful things going on all the time it was hard to keep steady, especially as every one was much over-worked. Miss Taylor and I had to stick pretty tight to the office work or it would have swamped us; so we tried to keep up with ourselves each day, and never left at night until we had every S. I. and D. I. letter written. Of course the end of the month came along just then, and all the regular monthly things had to be tucked in also. And of course there was no possibility of having a clever man-stenographer for two days to do my complicated British payroll, as I have had before, for every available man was working night and day, hence I had to squeeze that in also. So a job that takes about two solid days of an uninterrupted clerk’s time had to be put into the midst of an office where people were running in and out every minute; but it got done, and I was a bit proud when I finished the thing at ten o’clock that night when the first reënforcement arrived.

We have certainly learned what we can do. I don’t mind for myself, but it breaks my heart to see my children get hollow-eyed and white, and see them one by one succumb, at least temporarily, and have to be sent to bed. They have done wonders. To-day, for instance, with 130 nurses here, after all they have been through, I have just three in hospital; one with diphtheria, one with a kind of trench fever due to exhaustion, and the third, my dear, brave soul who came down from the evacuated C. C. S. She has just “exhaustion” for a diagnosis. She was sent down without baggage or the rest of the team, 48 hours after arriving. The last ten hours of her trip were standing in a freight car packed with refugees. She arrived here at five one morning dead to the world. She had slept on the floor the two nights before as much as she could and been operating sixteen hours straight before that. We were so thankful to get her back safely. The men arrived safely later. Her C. C. S. was captured. She went on duty 36 hours after she arrived here apparently as good as new, but she could not stand the strain and could not eat, so we sent her to the Sick Sisters’ Hospital for a rest. In quarters I have one nurse recovering from gastro-enteritis and another with a bothersome knee, and all the rest are working! Isn’t that doing pretty well for women? After my two nights up until after two and going each morning as usual for very, very busy mornings, making arrangements about new nurses and seeing to their records, I had a bit of an upset myself and felt pretty miserable. So one afternoon I went to bed at four and stayed there until the next morning and have been much better since. It has all been something of a strain.

Then the morning after the second night up (April 4) Major Murphy brought me in my order to go to Paris to be Chief Nurse of the American Red Cross. It was almost too much, but I was too busy to think about it, so I put it in my pocket and tried to forget it. To-night I am going to tell my original group. I am appointed by the Chief Surgeon and am still in the Army. It is an order, and there is no disputing it. When I get away, I shall be glad of the opportunity it presents, but just at present I cannot seem to bear it. These were just the American orders, and I must wait for the British ones, which will probably come through in a few days. I am “relieved from further duty at No. 12 General Hospital B. E. F. and will proceed to Paris, France, reporting on arrival to the Chief Surgeon, Am. Red Cross in France, for duty as Chief Nurse with the American Red Cross.”

I saw Phil yesterday a moment and told him of my order, and strangely enough he had just received an order to go to Paris for duty with Dr. Blake’s hospital. Curious, isn’t it? But won’t it be nice for us both to be there? Paris is not such a sweet little health resort just at present as it has been. But bombs and long-distance guns are nothing to me.

I guess you don’t need to be told how I feel about leaving my children here after all we have been through together. It is quite beyond words. I am just trying to steel myself to it, and to get it over as fast as possible. Now it is time to go and break it to them. How can I make them glad to have me go? For I must do that.

It’s the next day now--a quiet, sunny Sunday. Everything went all right last night, and my nurses are bricks. They weep, but they are glad to have me go. I am trying to get ready to leave in a few days. I am so sorry for all your uncertainty about me. It was a grand mix-up. Miss Taylor is to be Chief Nurse here.

Loads and loads of love,

Jule.

It was getting dark as I went down between the A and B lines of tents. Ducking under the entrance of A. 3 tent, I stopped just a moment inside the door, to get used to the darkness in the tent. The fourteen beds in the tent were all full and I thought at first that no nurse was there. Then I saw her. She was kneeling beside the low cot of a lad whose whole head was bandaged. The tight starch bandage covered his ears and his eyes, and came down under his chin. A glance at his face showed that he was not far from the end. “Robert, lad, what are you trying to say?” she was asking, bending over him with her arm across his shoulder and her face close to his lips. “Say it again, boy, so that I can hear you. Did you want me to do something for you?” Slowly pulling his arms out he reached up and drew her head down to his and kissed her on the cheek. “I think,” he said, “you must be like my sister.” Just then she saw me. “Oh, excuse me, Matron,” she said as she rose, “I didn’t hear you come in.” We walked through to the connecting tent while the other thirteen men stirred and pretended to wake up.

A nurse stopped at the office to leave the notices of two new “Dangerously Ill” cases. As she handed me the slip she said, “Of the sixty-four new stretcher cases we got in last night, all have bandaged eyes. They are the worst gassed men I have ever seen. I’ve done nothing but irrigate eyes all the morning. One man discovered that he could see a little when I got his lids opened and his eyes washed out, and he burst out ‘Oh, sister, I can see, and I am not going to be blind after all, am I?’ Then I realized what an agony of fear there must be in the minds of those sixty-four motionless men, not one of whom had even whimpered--so since then I’ve been saying to each one that he was sure to see after a while, for you know if they live they nearly all do get back their sight, and probably not more than those two D. I.’s will die. But think what they have been suffering!”

Another nurse was giving a bath to a man who had just been brought in on a stretcher, “Oh, but you are the dirtiest man I ever saw,” she laughed at him, “absolutely the very dirtiest.” “Oh, sister, don’t say that,” he said. “How could I help it? I haven’t had a bath nor a change of underclothes for twenty-two days.”--Quick came the answer, “If that’s the case, I call you clean.”

The orderly came up to the sister and said, “May I have a piece of gauze and a bandage?” “Surely,” she said, as she handed it to him, “and what do you want it for?” “For the Hun there at the door who has cut his finger.” Looking down the hut to the door, she could see standing just outside a Boche prisoner and his British guard. The orderly took the dressings outside and bandaged up the finger. When he came back, some of the patients who had been watching said, “I wish his finger were off, and why didn’t you cut off his head? etc.” Then a man in a near-by bed, whose leg was stretched out in a weighted extension, said, “Oh, boys, don’t talk like that; we are fighting the Huns up the line, but we are not fighting them down here.”

When he came up with the rest of the blue, hospital-clothed men for final inspection before being signed out for Convalescent camp, the Major noticed that he had a D. S. M. ribbon on his coat. “How did you get this, Jock?” the Major asked, pointing to the ribbon. “Oh that, sir,” he said, “there were a few occurrences, sir,” and he went on his way.

His right leg had been amputated, his right hand was badly wounded, and his left foot had a hole right through it, but he was always smiling and cheerful, and had a come-back for every foolish thing that was said to him. One day the Padre asked him how he could keep so cheerful all the time when he must have so much pain. “Oh,” he laughed, “it’s in the book, Boy Scouts Manual, page 8, paragraph 3, ‘Smile and keep whistling.’”