Finding Themselves / The Letters of an American Amy Chief Nurse in the British Hospital in France

by Julia C. Stimson

Sunday evening, October 14.

Dearest Dad and Mother:—

Miss Taylor and I are in our cozy office waiting for the time for the evening report, which won’t be for about half an hour yet. We have both been to first supper and will now rest ourselves a little for this half hour. She has decided to do a picture puzzle. I wish you all could see how nice our office is. We have the tiniest coal stove that ever existed, and yet it is just the right size for this place. We have been having a fire in it for the past few days, for it has been very cold and raining almost every day. An orderly with a lantern has just come in out of the darkness to tell us that sixty cases are on the way to the hospital now and sixty more are coming at midnight. We are just about full to capacity, but every day we send out some, so every day we can take more in. I have been off duty a couple of hours late this afternoon, the first time off since I got back from Paris last Tuesday.

Phil, who is walking a little with me every day, came up to our mess for tea this afternoon and afterwards I walked with him around the race track. He was pretty glad to get back to bed after this rather lengthy expedition. His wound is very nearly closed. It has done remarkably well. After I left him being put to bed by the nice convalescent patient who looks after him, I went down to the evening service in the Y. M. C. A. hut, the Sunday evening Episcopal service that comes just before the Non-conformist service.

Dean Davis conducted the service, and how I wished that some of his St. Louis parishioners could have seen him. His audience in that rough hut was about 200 convalescent patients in their blue suits, with heads or arms bandaged, or coughing, coughing the way so many of our poor gassed men cough. There were a few English Sisters and V. A. D.’s there, but I was the only American, this evening. I wish you could hear these men sing. There is nothing like the singing that I’ve heard the Tommies do. Their deep voices singing in unison, and with great earnestness such words as “Plenteous grace with thee is found, Grace to cleanse from every sin, Let the healing streams abound, Make and keep me pure within,” can never be forgotten. The Dean spoke briefly, but right out from the shoulder to them from that chapter in the letter to the Ephesians about, “Lie not, for ye are members one of another, and let him that stole, steal no more but rather let him work, that he may have wherewith to give to him that hath need,” etc. There was more about tenderness, and growing in grace.

Speaking of tenderness, I have never in all my life seen such tenderness as these men show to each other. If you could see, as we so often see, men with horrible leg injuries reaching way over to feed the man in the bed next to them, who may have arm injuries and be helpless. And always the up-patients are so good to the bedridden ones. Our hospital simply could not run without the help of the patients themselves. They fetch and carry and bathe and scrub and hold legs and arms for dressings, and joke and jolly each other along till it would break your heart, for they themselves are sick men. For our up-patients here have been mighty sick or they would have been sent on to England, unless they are some of the few that are going back to the Convalescent Camp and from there back into the lines. So often, too, we see a man reach way over from his bed to give his neighbor a puff at his cigarette.

I have felt so rich recently, for I got such a wonderful lot of letters, all in one batch. How I did enjoy them. All the family ones I took right down to read with Phil in his little tent. We had a regular orgy.

It’s now Friday, the 18th, and such a lovely day as it has been, clear and sunny and cold. I had a little walk with Ruth just after lunch and it reminded us of November days at home, except for what we saw. For all we saw was camps, camps, camps and soldiers of every sort. We did not have time to go beyond the area of camps, but off in the distance we could see the lovely ridges that make the edge of this little basin that Rouen is in. When we came back, I walked a few minutes with Phil. It takes a long time for his strength to come back, poor boy. He is awfully good and patient and as little trouble as a person could be. I think he is a little depressed to-day by his feeling of mimsiness, and the being out of things. He finds it harder to be up a little every day, for, as he says, when he is dressed he looks like every one else, and then he can’t do like them at all. When he was in bed all the time, he did not mind his incapacitation so much. Now is the time that he needs petting and amusing and fussing over. His injury was no little thing and he is being a marvel of goodness about it all, but it is beastly hard for him, to have to hang around and wait to get strong. After a little while I am going to see what can be done about convalescence in some better place. It is hard to know whether a convalescent home for officers in the south of France, alone without his friends and me, would do him more good than these plain doings and all of us. When he can get about a bit more, he will find it more interesting; for then I can go down town to meals with him and take walks, and he can do those things with other people too. He has had a hard experience, but it is doing big things for him, I can see that plainly. I am so glad he is here with me. I can never be grateful enough.

Our great busyness has continued all week though we have not been quite full to the limit. On Monday last, Major Murphy and his team, and Capt. Post and his team, returned from their Clearing Stations. Each team had one nurse. I wish so much you could know what those people have been doing and going through. You really would hardly believe their tales. They are all absolutely tired out. Major Murphy seems to be in the best condition, but he said he was dreadfully tired. The nurses are almost all in. We made them stay in bed 36 hours and have started them off on the easiest places we could find for them. But it will take a good many weeks, I am afraid, before they will sleep properly and not dream about stopping hemorrhages, and stop smelling the smells they smelled up there. What with the steam, the ether, and the filthy clothes of the men, which they had to cut off before they could begin to start, the odor in the operating room was so terrible that it was all that any of them could do to keep from being sick. One of my nurses was sick at her stomach all night long the first night she worked there, and just ran in and out all night, but kept right on with her work, though she says that if she lives to be a hundred and fifty years old, she will never forget that night. One doctor and one nurse work at each table and you can imagine what surgical work the nurse has to do, no mere handing of instruments and sponges, but sewing and tying up and putting in drains while the doctor takes the next piece of shell out of another place. Then after fourteen hours of this, with freezing feet, to a meal of tea and bread and jam, and off to rest if you can in a wet bell tent in a damp bed without sheets, after a wash with a cupful of water.

The trip down from the front was very hard. They all came by train this time. One team after a long train trip arrived at a fair-sized coast town at 2 P.M. The doctor tried to get a room at the hotel for the nurse, who was dead with cold and fatigue, but all the rooms had been taken by officers going through on their way to posts. Their train was to go out at one A.M., so the doctor only wanted the room for the evening for this nurse. Finally the proprietor said he would let the nurse have the room of an officer who had gone out for the evening but he was expected in at twelve. But that seemed fine, so the nurse had a little rest in this man’s room, but at twelve was called, for the officer had come back and was waiting outside the door. The rest of the night she sat up in a freezing French railway carriage, the only woman with her doctor, her two orderlies, and two Tommies. The Tommies and the orderlies piled up on each other and went sound to sleep, but she and the doctor waggled and jolted through the miserable, damp, cold night. They reached here at one o’clock the next afternoon, and really had come so few miles as the crow flies. How I wished for a warm bathroom and a quiet cozy sleeping place for these weary, dirty, splendid women of mine. But willing, eager hands brought pitchers of hot water and put hot-water bags in little beds that are clean if small, and brought trays of food, and now after two days both of the nurses are looking a little less green and black around the eyes. And how glad and grateful we are to have them back. There are two more away, and another is probably to go soon, and she is none the less eager after hearing the tales of the others. Major Murphy says the experience is, of course, very wonderful, but it is brutal. He means brutal on the teams. But English men and women have been doing this for months and months. This was a very big push that these two teams have been through. It is a marvel to me that human beings can stand it all.