Another nurse writes: “When I think of these boys being carried in wounded, ay, wounded almost beyond all recognition, but smiling bravely to the last, it makes one feel proud to be British. As our Padre said, we did God’s own work up there.”
The nurses on the hospital trains have a fine record of service. Though less monotonous than the life in a stationary hospital, it is a curious existence to be living permanently in a train, continually travelling to and fro on one stretch of line, nursing in cramped quarters and under particularly tiring conditions. Three nurses recently received the Military Medal “for conspicuous bravery under fire, on No. 27 Ambulance Train.” The train was carrying a full load of nearly five hundred sick and wounded away by night from a town in the vicinity of the Somme front, when an aeroplane attack began. Five bombs fell in the immediate neighbourhood of the train. The windows were smashed and the lights went out. The train gave a heave which threw some of the patients out of their cots. One of the sisters is reported to have called out to the men in her coach: “Now, be quiet and good, boys, till I light a lamp.” This she managed to do, and the men declared that her hand never trembled. The commanding officer reports that “the sisters went about their work coolly, collectively, and cheerfully, and that by their magnificent conduct they not only allayed alarm among the helpless patients and those suffering from shell shock, but caused both patients and personnel to play up to the standard which they set.”
Wonderful work, too, has been done by the nurses in the hospital ships in conditions of ever-increasing danger. “We landed 1300 wounded yesterday morning,” writes a hospital ship sister on the cross-Channel service. “It was a wonderful experience ... nearly nine hundred were on the decks and steerage with broken arms, etc. All the eighty-four in my ward were stretcher cases.... The work was terrific.” There is now an all too long list of nurses who have suffered shipwreck at the hands of the enemy, while some have lost their lives. When a great ship was recently torpedoed in the Mediterranean the nurses had a narrow escape. One of them has described her experience in the open boat as follows: “Our safety lay in keeping as far from the ship as possible, heavy seas making the pull to land out of the question. The huge swell increased the fear for the safety of our boat, as we were sitting waist-deep in water. Baling was of no use; the harder we baled, the quicker we filled. A cry from the back of the boat caused all eyes to turn in time to see the ship first list to port side, then turn and take a long, straight dip beneath the waves. The sea was wilder and rougher than ever, and three gigantic waves in succession completely swamped our small boat, and all that was left to us now was to cling to the ropes in the boat and to each other.” Eventually, however, the nurses were rescued just in time by a destroyer. Such experiences are no longer rare adventures—they are the hourly anticipation of all workers who serve in hospital ships, since the Germans have ceased to regard the badge of the Red Cross as a sacred and inviolable symbol.
A description is given elsewhere in this book of work in a typical base hospital. If comparisons are possible, perhaps the most unselfish of all hospital work is that which falls to the lot of those sisters and nurses whose duty is the care of the sick and wounded German prisoners. To have to expend their energy and devotion on Germans is unwelcome work for any Englishwomen to-day, but the spirit in which these nurses accept their difficult task is well illustrated by the following account from a sister who is in charge of a ward of German prisoners in a great military hospital in London. She says: “The German prisoner of war in hospital in England comes on the whole as a pleasant surprise, though a nurse gets an unpleasant shock when she is detailed for duty amongst the prisoners. For several months I have been in charge of a large number of wounded Germans, and I find them on the whole quite good patients. At first their cleanliness and habits are not all that can be desired, neither do they bear pain well. But they give very little trouble, and are extremely grateful for what is done for them. They are very observant, and make themselves quite useful as soon as they are able to get about. They are of great assistance to the nurses in carrying round screens, wheeling dressing-trollies, etc. Perhaps the most striking thing about them is the almost womanly care which, without exception, they give to a comrade more sick than themselves. As patients much may be said in their favour, and the work amongst them is a wonderful experience.” No better proof could be given of how the true nurse’s instinct dominates her entire work; her care for her patients, and, above all, her appreciation of their good qualities, overcoming her natural and instinctive prejudice.
To the nurses of the war, it will be admitted by all, belongs the crown of women’s war service. Their ranks contain many heroines whose names and deeds will never be chronicled; but their selfless devotion, their courage, their unquestioning acceptance of any risk, and their willing sacrifice of personal comfort, health, even life itself, will stand for all time in the proudest memorials of these tragic years.