The Women’s Hospital Corps have established a hospital at the Château Mauricien at Wimereux, and is recognised by the War Office.
(Signed) D. D. S.——, Lt.-Col.,
for A. D. M. S.
5th November 1914.
Armed with this, Quartermaster Campbell assumed her duties, and, accompanied by her model from the Grand, sought out the Supply Depot. She returned with most superabundant rations, the male quartermaster apologising and puzzled; for he could not understand how or why they had got so much. Miss Campbell’s account was:
‘An orderly asked me if I would like a side of bacon, and when I said yes, he put it in the car. And another said a case of peaches would be useful and put it in. And some one else brought the jam and the cheese, and they said a bag of tea and another of sugar would not come amiss. And just as we were leaving, a sergeant threw in two hams.’
‘So there it all is,’ she ended gleefully.
On the following day, the 6th of November, the hospital was ready for occupation; the plumber and gas-fitter were ejected, the pantry became an operating theatre, the greenhouse was converted into a linen room and packstore. In the evening the ambulances met the trains, and the large ward on the ground floor filled up. Before very long all the beds were occupied, and the Chief Surgeon and her two assistants were kept busy with severe cases and heavy surgery. The pressure of work continued until January; and both doctors and nurses had their hands full. The place was small enough to be very personal, and the relationship between the staff and the men was a close one.
The women felt strangely near the Front, for the men came down from the lines in a few hours, and their tales of the mud and wet in which they were standing almost up to their waists, the agony of frostbite, the terrible shortage of ammunition and the superiority of the German guns made pitiful hearing. The anxiety and strain of the severe cases was as nothing to the pathos of the slight cases who had to be sent straight back. As the day came nearer, their eyes would follow the Chief Surgeon round the ward, apprehensive of discharge; and when at last the moment of farewell came, they were silent, for fear of losing their composure. A parcel of all the comforts possible was prepared for each one, and the hospital turned out to see them off, and some one would go with them to ‘Base Details,’ as the reporting station was called. But there was no getting over the horror of going back. Many of them, when they came out, had had no idea of what was before them; and others were unfitted by temperament and by their former life for all they had to endure.
A Lancashire operative, no longer a young man, told how he had put his name to a paper.
‘Missus she said I should, and so I did, but I never thought anything would coom of it.’