A Nurse's Life in War and Peace

by E. C. Laurence

The next day we found the idea had been to send us up to Mooi River, but it was thought that, with the winter coming on, that would be a cold place for sick troops, so we had better be nearer the coast; and then a Durban gentleman came forward, and most kindly offered the use of his estate of 150 acres at Pinetown; it is only about seventeen miles from Durban, but much higher up and more healthy; so the offer was gratefully accepted, and the building was at once begun.

Then followed a time when we all had to forget that we had come out to "nurse the sick and wounded," and turn to work at other jobs.

Before they were ready for us to go up to Pinetown we were all inoculated against typhoid. It was not a pleasant experience: my temperature went up to 102°, and I had intense abdominal pain and headache; it seemed like a very concentrated touch of typhoid, but it kept us in bed only two or three days, and the following five or six days we felt as weak as though we had been ill for a month.

As soon as possible I went up to see where our hospital was to be built, and found them busy levelling the ground for the tin pavilions.

There were three permanent buildings already up on the land; one, we thought, would make a good ward for officers (eight beds); another had a large room we thought would do for our staff mess-room, and some small rooms suitable for medical officers' bedrooms; and the third was a row of rooms that was apportioned for sisters' rooms, and various offices, stores, &c.

The orderlies were established in tents a little way off; they were all St. John's Ambulance men, and camping out was a new experience for them, so of course they did not know how to make themselves as comfortable as regular soldiers would have done in a new camp. They had joined expecting to have the excitement of stretcher work at the front, and when they were told off to level the ground for the buildings, or to carry up the planks and the heavy boxes from the railway trucks, and to help the builders put up the pavilions, there was a good deal of grumbling.

At first the Major in command would not hear of our going up to stay until they had got some more of the stores up—beds, sheets, &c.; but when he found how slowly they got on, and how discontented the men were at having to rough it, he gave leave for me to go up with one other sister, as we thought we might help a bit, and, at any rate, could show the men we were willing to take our share.

The hospital we had brought out was for one hundred beds, but there was urgent need for more beds, so the P.M.O. had given orders that more huts were to be sent to us, and that we were to open as a two hundred bed hospital.

The railway was so hard worked that we had the greatest difficulty to get trucks to bring the building materials up from Durban, and the docks at Durban were so crowded with stores that it was most difficult to get the things through.

Some of our medical officers worked nobly at the docks, getting the things packed on to trucks, while the others superintended the unloading at Pinetown.