It is the next evening now and we are waiting for the Night Supervisors to come to get the evening report and to be told the arrangements for the night. Things have been keeping up the same way ever since last evening. Only, two of our men have died and we were so glad to have them die. The sister of the man with the double amputation has arrived from England after such a rough, cold trip. We have had a case of diphtheria develop to-day among the nurses and she has been sent off to the contagious hospital, where Phil will probably have charge of her. She had a throat yesterday and we isolated her until a report from her throat-culture could be obtained. Of course we are taking cultures from the “contacts,” but hope there will be no more positives. Still no bad arms from the vaccinations!
The men tell such dreadful stories and are so glad to get into bed and to be made clean. Often we cannot get them bathed even the least little bit before they have to be taken to the operating room, but we try to wash them up as soon as possible. Just think of the problem of hot water to bathe five or six hundred patients in a camp where all the hot water has to be heated on camp stoves after being drawn from about a single pipe. The “walking wounded” are so pathetic. They go limping off to the tents to which they have been assigned, leaning on each other and helping each other all they can. A nurse told me a few minutes ago that one of her incoming patients who walked in was a young boy who had had his right arm amputated four days ago! Another one said he had had nothing to eat but cigarettes and tea for four days! Another with an amputated arm was so troubled to have a sister bathe and shave and shampoo him. She is a crackerjack at shaving, and all the orderlies are carrying stretchers. But oh, she was so glad to make him clean and comfortable. Our dietitian, Miss Watkins, is doing regular nursing work and doing it so well. One of the nurses told me that before Miss W. gave her first bath she said, “Now, I’ll just pretend that this is my brother.” She takes temperatures and pulses and bathes and feeds but does not do dressings yet. She is so fine, but says she does not ever want to go back to cooking. Here are the night people, and I must stop. I have been down to the camp since I started to write.
Much, much love,
J.
April 6, 1918.
I last wrote on March 25th, and now it is nearly two weeks later. Our rush has kept steadily up until day before yesterday. Yesterday was the very first day in two weeks that any nurse had any time off duty. Yesterday, because of reënforcements that arrived, we were able to send every nurse off to rest for three hours. It was the most extraordinary Easter anybody ever spent. For two nights before we had over two hundred patients sleeping on the benches on the grand stands. These were “walking wounded,” but wounded, you will notice. On one of those days we had over fifteen hundred patients. We never kept any “walkers”; they were sent right on to the Convalescent Camps, where they were able to expand more. We dressed every case here, though, before they were sent on. We certainly found out not only what we can do in an emergency, but what the British Army system can do. We are constantly marveling at the efficiency, speed, and lack of waste with which the English manage their business.
We all physically were so hard pushed Major Murphy wired for help, and just a day before this lull we received a mobile Unit from the A. E. F., fifteen nurses and thirty-odd enlisted men. You may be sure we were glad to get them, though fifteen nurses were just lost in the shuffle and did not seem to make the slightest difference. They all were very young, inexperienced, little things from Kentucky, who had only recently landed and had not seen a patient since they had been over. Some of them are only twenty-one (the age limit has been lowered; it was twenty-five when we left) and have only been out of a training-school a very short time, and had only been in very small Kentucky hospitals. So it seemed a heart-breaking thing to thrust them into this unbelievable hell of a hospital.
Such a baptism of fire as they got that first afternoon! I tried to prepare them all I could, but no words could convey anything like the reality to their inexperienced minds. It was pouring when they came at 12:30 A.M. (and me to meet them here, and feed them, and find them a place to sleep with a half-hour’s notice of their coming!) and it was pouring rain the next afternoon when the Supervisor started off with the little rubber-coated-and-hatted group to drop one here and another there according to assignments we had made here in the office. A little later I had occasion to go down in the lines, and I looked in one of the huts just to see what the little new thing looked like. Just before I got to the hut a little procession had come out of the door. First two of our men carrying a stretcher covered with a Union Jack, then a second stretcher also covered by a flag, then our Supervisor walking behind accompanying them to the mortuary. People along the line stood rigidly at attention as they passed, and saluted. Then I went into the hut. The odor that hit me as I entered was terrific, for most of the cases in this hut have penetrating chest wounds which drain. The little nurse was standing by the stove stirring something in a cup on it with a spoon. She was green-white and looked utterly nauseated. I did not dare speak to her, for fear she would lose any control she had left, so I told the weary head nurse to be as gentle with the little thing as she could and try to realize what she was going through.
That evening I spoke to their group for about ten minutes and told them that it was not going to be like this always, and about the mitigations and the happy part of it all. Then I asked them if, after all, this was not what they had come for, and weren’t they glad they were here. A most sincere response made me feel that they would be all right soon. Like all young things, they are adjusting wonderfully and are already making themselves felt, and are going about as chipper and happy as monkeys. But oh, the poor little dears, they will never forget that first day.
The night after these fifteen arrived another contingent appeared at 1:15 A.M. in the pouring rain! This time I had known it about three hours, but at that time of night there was very little I could do to make preparation, for I simply insisted that my poor tired nurses should not be disturbed. I lay on my bed part of the evening, but as a nurse was sick and I had to get Major Fischel for her, it was not for long. When they arrived, weary and miserable, I fed them hot soup, made from bouillon cubes that some kind person had sent us, and gave them bread and cheese and jam, and then put them to bed in the night nurses’ beds in their separate huts. They could not even have a wash, but they said they did not care, all they wanted was sleep.