Miss Madge Greg has been doing rest-station work since January, 1915, and has been quartered at various stations on the lines of communication. Starting a new station entails hard work, and the workers need to show resource and quickness, and the ability to adapt their arrangements on the instant to existing conditions, however inconvenient and uncomfortable they may be. Railway trucks or a goods shed have had to be transformed in a few hours into a spotlessly clean dressing station, where men could be brought from the improvised ambulance trains to have their wounds re-dressed.
On one occasion the unit with which Miss Greg was working received a message that unexpected special trains were on their way, and could not be drawn up at the existing rest station. Within an hour the workers managed to get their stores and apparatus moved round to another part of the line. “And,” writes Miss Greg, “by 7 a.m. we had everything in readiness within the new dressing station, and ten boilers of hot cocoa out near the trains. There followed days and nights of continuous hard work, and more trains than ever before—this was our experience of the battle of Loos.”
With time the rest stations were housed in proper huts, and also, as the number of fully-equipped hospital trains increased, the need for dressings was no longer so urgent. A later development has been an arrangement for small wards at some of the rest stations, where bad cases could be brought from the trains and 48-hour cases from among the local troops could be treated.
In many ways rest-station duty is very trying, for the work is necessarily so unevenly divided. Times of rush come after the heavy fighting, when there is no respite by day or night. But workers like Miss Greg and her companions never spare themselves fatigue or effort. The only thing that matters is that no ambulance train should find them unprepared, no wound should suffer for want of fresh dressing, no cold, tired soldier should be disappointed of his hot drink. The rushes are followed by long periods when there is hardly enough work to fill the day, and the girls become conscious of the grim, draughty surroundings of the railway station, which form the entire horizon of their life. They have, however, found many other little ways of service, such as undertaking all the laundry arrangements for the sisters nursing permanently on the ambulance trains, starting a lending library, and doing “little things” for the soldiers on the leave trains. It is just in the doing of these “little things” that Red Cross workers, amongst whom Miss Greg and Miss Lyne are typical, are performing such valuable service. There is little excitement and no limelight in a life such as they lead, and it entails hard work at any hour of the day or night, whenever they may happen to be called upon. But their reward lies in the moments of cheer and brightness which they have been able to bring to so many thousands of suffering men, in that never-ending procession of pain ebbing away from the battlefields. Their kind ministrations have changed a dreary wait in a cold, dull station into an episode that soldiers who have passed through will remember with thankfulness—a moment of respite, bringing new courage, warmth, and comfort when all were sorely needed.
XXIII
MRS. LEACH
In the summer of 1915 the Women’s Legion, a war organisation started by Lady Londonderry, represented to the War Office that the services of women might be used in cooking for the troops. Various obvious advantages were connected with the suggestion. There was only a limited and insufficient number of men trained as Army cooks, and the introduction of women to do work which naturally falls within their sphere would thus release men for tasks which they alone are suited to undertake. It must also be a considerable gain to any troops to have their cooking managed by highly trained women able to devote their whole time to the work, rather than by men to whom this was only one of other military duties. As a result of these representations, permission was obtained in August, 1915, for one hundred cooks to start work as an experiment in certain of the military convalescent camps.
Almost from the first the work at the camp where the largest number of women was employed was carried on under the personal management of Mrs. Leach, who has been identified throughout with the movement. She is now in control of the great organisation of women cooks for the Army which has grown out of this tentative beginning.
MRS. LEACH