Now that the rain has stopped, we are having perfectly lovely days, but the nights are very cold; they say that a little later on it is bitterly cold up here.
There were six deaths during my first fortnight on night duty, and it was awfully sad, as one felt they had so little chance, and I cannot really see why they should not be better "done by"; but the sisters seem to think that it is the natural order of things, and that we must just "do our best and leave the rest."
The General was here the other day, and said that all the men were to have tumblers instead of mugs, but I suppose he does not know that they have not each got a mug yet!
There is one enteric tent (the last one opened) of fourteen beds, and their equipment includes only four mugs, and not a single feeding-cup at all. One night I found a man, who had not got enteric, sent there for the sake of having night orderlies, as he was very ill; so I had to borrow a mug for him from another line, and the next day I bought him the necessary fittings at the coolie store; but it won't do much good, as the orderlies probably won't take proper precautions to wash up for him separately.
There are some new R.A.M.C. officers here now, and one of them seems energetic; I don't know what had gone wrong that he was poking into, but one of the sisters heard him say to a sergeant, "Hospital scandals are not in it," so we can only hope things will improve here.
There was much excitement here one night. A major arrived, sick, in a mule buggy from a column near here; the C.O. saw him, and told him what tent to go to, but he never arrived. After much searching of the camp, neither the officer nor his mules could be found; then the heliograph was set to work, and eventually he was located at the next station, and when he was brought back he said the C.O. was so rude to him that he thought he would not stay, and had gone to a hotel!
Since I came off night duty I, and two other sisters, have been doing only "afternoon duty," which means looking after the camp while all the other sisters are off duty; this is because there are more sisters here than the proper number: if there were only the right number, two of the sisters who have lines would stay on every afternoon in turn; but the stupid thing about it is that if we were each turned on to a big tent of enterics (instead of one sister having all the line on her hands) we might be doing really useful nursing; as it is, there is not much to do in the afternoon, beyond prowling round and trying to talk to the men and cheer them up a bit.
The other day one of them presented me with these lines of his own composition; he was in a tent when I was on night duty where there was a very bad case:
(By an Australian Trooper.)
You may talk of our Soldiers and Sailors,