A Nurse's Life in War and Peace

by E. C. Laurence

The enteric line is now full, so one of my tents has been allowed to have night orderlies, and we collect the bad cases into that.

You would be amused at a "kit inspection" here: when one is proclaimed, the excitement is great, and the orderlies, almost tearing their hair, are so distracted that if the sister has any bad cases, she must nurse them herself, or understand that they will get no attention till the inspection is over! All the ward equipment, mugs, plates, buckets, brooms, &c., has to be laid out at the tent door for the officers to count. In a hospital at home, when "stock-taking" comes, you know that anything that is worn out, or damaged, or really lost, will be replaced, and you are glad of the chance of getting things made correct; but here they assure me that things must be correct, or the orderly gets fined or punished; so, to avoid this, he resorts to strategy.

As soon as the officer (with the wardmaster and orderly in attendance) has passed one tent as correct, the things may be put away again, and then comes in the help of the patients (who fully enter into the game), the most nimble trotting off with a medicine glass to one orderly who is short of that, or a bucket to another; I have known a good broom do duty for three different lines by careful dodging about.

I find one of the senior sisters here is one who applied to me when I was choosing sisters to bring out at first; but I had many to choose from, and I made no mistake in thinking others more suited for the work! Another sister who did come out with me has recently come up here, but she has not been very well since she came, and thinks the life here is very rough, so she is trying to get an exchange.

Sisters can get away from here only by inducing others to exchange with them; and it is not easy to make any one believe that this is a desirable station. I have not tried yet, as I want to stick to it if I can (of course I can't do much, but I can make a few men more comfortable), but most of the others are trying to exchange.

Our meat chiefly consists of trek ox, and it is so tough that it is difficult to tackle; about once a week we get skinny mutton.

The bread is all right, but several times lately the butter has not arrived, and we have to do without. We buy chocolates and biscuits at the coolie store to fill up the cracks.

The other day we had in a sick convoy that had been seven days on the road, and one poor fellow was so bad with dysentery that he died an hour after they lifted him out of the ambulance; really these long days of knocking about in the ambulances seem about the worst of the hardships that the poor chaps have to put up with, especially for the very sick or the wounded. You see, most of the waggons are drawn by about sixteen mules, and sometimes they trot and sometimes they walk, but sometimes they turn really mulish and won't budge; and then, after much hauling and thrashing and shouting, they start with a great bound and go off at a gallop. They are seldom on anything that you could call a road, and are much more frequently on the rough veldt.

A man who has been badly wounded can tell you all about the day when he got knocked over—he does not care to say much about the long day in the blazing sun, when he lay thirsty where he fell before the Bearer Company came along; and then, perhaps, the dark night with frost on the ground, or rain falling; he shudders when he tells you of the groaning men who lay around him, and who gradually ceased to groan, and how he began to think the ambulance would be too late to pick him up too—but what he simply can't bear to speak about is the agony of being pitched about with a fractured bone for days in one of those waggons.

It is not so bad when the fighting is anywhere near the rail, as then the wounded are soon placed in the hospital trains, and are fairly comfortable; but the long days of travelling by waggon are terrible.