A Nurse's Life in War and Peace

by E. C. Laurence

The P.M.O. is a major of the R.A.M.C., and he is just as strict with the orderlies as the major I worked with at Pinetown; so the men are well cared for, and I am enjoying working for him.

I was the first sister to join the ship, and, as I found the cabins would be very full, I asked if I might act as night sister, and thereby I secured a cabin to myself.

I have had plenty to do most of the way, as there have been several men and one officer very ill all the time; but we have had no deaths on the voyage, and most of the patients seem to be mending now.

On my first night on duty I had been round the hospital, and then I thought I would take a look at the convalescent men in the swinging cots (ninety of them), and I found there a poor colour-sergeant, who had been out only a few months, going back with hopelessly bad heart disease from overstrain; he was unable to lie down, and so breathless and blue, I got him transferred to the hospital, and was able to make him comfortable with pillows, &c. He has been such a good patient and has improved a little, but I fear he can never work again, and he is a married man.

There are two quite young lads who have been having epileptic fits frequently on the voyage—I suppose brought on by exposure to the South African sun.

A young Yorkshire farmer of the Yeomanry was invalided home as a "phthisis" case, but he came into hospital the day after we sailed with a temperature of 105°, and he has been desperately ill with enteric all the way (severe hæmorrhage, &c.). He must have had fever for some time before it was diagnosed—the temperature being attributed to his chest condition. He is still very weak, but I think he will pull through.

One night I was told that a man in the swinging cots was "rather peculiar," so I went down to see him first thing, and found his cot empty. I flew up on deck, and met some stewards, who had collared him on the upper deck. We made him snug in a safe corner of the hospital with a "special" for that night. Then, there was one poor fellow who had lost an arm, and two who had each lost a leg—one of the latter a sergeant-major, who was wounded at the same time that Colonel Benson was killed at Vlakfontein. He was a Kimberley man, and the poor man's wife and two little children were all killed by one Boer shell during the siege of Kimberley. He is going home to get fitted up with a cork leg, and will then return to South Africa.

Perhaps the saddest cases of all were the eleven lunatics we had on board. They had to be very safely kept with special guards and other precautions; and, in case they should try to go overboard, they had a high-railed enclosure on deck as an airing ground. Some of them are very mad and violent, but some seemed so nearly sane that it was a question whether they had not pretended to be mad in order to be sent home.

I was not supposed to visit these men in the night, because, to get to them, I should have had to go a long way through the troops' sleeping quarters, but the medical officer went to see them on his last round, and, every two or three hours, I used to stay in the hospital while the wardmaster went along, and brought word how they were.