The Other Anzacs (12 page)

Meanwhile, a letter arrived from Syd to say he had been promoted in charge of D Company. He was now ‘Captain Cook’, his wife noted wryly. But Elsie’s sojourn on the shores of the Mediterranean was coming to an end. ‘Matron rang up to say that all Australian Sisters at No. 17 were recalled and had to return to Cairo on Monday—horribly sorry, [Ruth] Earl and I very miserable and dejected indeed—dear old No. 17, how we love it!’
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Elsie could not bear the thought of her ‘dear old ward’ passing into other hands.

‘It has been so much mine, from those awful first days after its creation, it has slowly merged from chaos and muddle into its present orderly and cheerful state and now I have to go and leave it. I shall never like any ward so much as this.’
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But there was time for one last ride. ‘By a lucky accident, the old gate leading to our old route round the Sultan’s forbidden garden and those delectable bays, was left open. Rode on past the iron fence and thro the shallow surf to Aboukir. Feeling very sad on the way home, to think I should probably never ride along that seashore and home by the desert again!’
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Changing into an evening dress, she went to a dinner at the Summer Palace. It brought a final memory before leaving: ‘Had a nice little table out on the piazza, with a red shaded electric light, such a beautiful light, all the small tables dotted about with these red lights, the orchestra playing, overhead the moon shining.’
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The next day it was back to the stern realities of No. 2 Australian General Hospital in Cairo.

At No. 1 General Hospital at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, Alice Ross King mixed frenetically busy nursing with interludes with her male admirers. Arthur Logan was persistent in his ardour. She was beginning to like him, but although she thought he was ‘a delightful boy’, she did not understand him. ‘He talks of marriage etc but I can’t think that he is really in love though he imagines so himself. Anyhow he is a dear boy and wonderfully well behaved.’
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Despite developing a bad throat infection and being restricted to her room, Alice still ‘nicked up on to the balcony and had an hour’ with Arthur. ‘He is very lonely tonight and thinks I’m tired of him because I wanted to come back early.’
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Alice’s health deteriorated further. Three days later she complained to her diary: ‘I simply wept this a.m. when they would not let me go on duty. All the same I am pretty sick—got a rotten bronchitis.’
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Two days after the start of the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June there were 2000 wounded Australians lying in a hospital transport off Alexandria. Alice, still too ill to work, was given permission to go to the port city, where she recovered at the Beau Rivage Hotel. The sea breeze that had enchanted Elsie Cook, was ‘just glorious . . . Alexandria is full of soldiers of all descriptions, ’ Alice noted. ‘Frenchmen with their brilliant blue trousers and red tunics and yellow trimmings, Indians in [their] various uniforms and Australian and English soldiers.’
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Many were wounded. Still more were fresh reinforcements waiting to go to the front. Every hotel was full, every tram crowded with soldiers.

On her return to Cairo, Alice was confined to bed, frustrated at not being able to nurse the ‘great rush of wounded’. Arthur Logan sent her a box of sweets and a letter seeking a tryst on the balcony, where he professed his love. ‘He swears that he really and truly loves me. I don’t know what to make of him. It is only the thought of Frank [Smith] that keeps me from liking him too, ’ a confused Alice wrote. There is little doubt that Arthur was affected by the deaths of many of his comrades. Alice was moved to comment that ‘such a number of Arthur’s New Zealand friends have been killed’. He was a generous suitor, giving her ‘a beautiful piece of Turkish work which a Turkish lady whose tooth he pulled gave him’.
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There was another side to relations between the Anzacs and the Turks, as Alice noted after talking to Captain Atkins, who had just returned from a casualty clearing station at Gallipoli. He had worked with shells bursting all around as they operated. ‘He says that no one has actually seen any cruelty of the Turks and that they have found our Australians who had to be left wounded in a trench all night had been dressed and given a drink in the night by the Turkish doctors. He also says that our men have gone just mad and needlessly kill the Turks. Cutting their throats. He tells one story of two stretcher bearers who came in and gleefully recounted how they had met a Turk and had taken his rifle from him and one stretcher bearer sat on his chest while the other cut his throat.’
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Good and bad were often difficult to distinguish in war.

A letter came from Frank Smith in Alexandria, saying he had been badly wounded in the chest. Alice realised he ‘must be pretty bad’ because the medical staff was drawing off fluid and the bullet had not been found. Her heart went out to him. ‘My Dear Boy. It’s terrible. Yet I do thank God that he is out of the firing line and how now thankful I am for my own sickness which gives me a chance to go to Alexandria again.’
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Alice managed to get a week’s leave and caught the overnight train to the port. Frank looked bad and had ‘lost a tremendous lot of flesh’, but he was better than Alice expected. She thought he would be all right, and professed ‘how I love him’.

Frank had been wounded during mine-laying operations. The Australians had been in the trenches for some days when they heard the sounds of Turks digging a mine towards the Australian trench line. They immediately counter-mined and blew up the Turks. A few days later the Turks repeated the exercise and this time succeeded before ultimately being driven back by bayonet-wielding Australians. Frank was off duty asleep when the explosion occurred, but jumped up and ran to the scene, where he was shot through the ribs.

As Frank recuperated, Alice fended off the attentions of other officers. She recorded her irritation in her diary. ‘The men over here are simply the limit, the moment they meet one they invite one to dinner or driving or riding or something. This captain, I don’t know his name, wants me for dinner on Tuesday night, ’ she wrote.
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It seemed to Alice that she was ‘the only Australian girl they have talked to for a long, long time’. But she had been forewarned. On the train to Alexandria, on her way to see Frank, she had shared a cabin with an acquaintance, Mr St Clair, a wealthy forty-year-old English bachelor working in the Egyptian railways who often entertained the sisters in his flat. During the journey he alluded to a perception that had already developed of the close relations between Anzac troops and Australian nurses. ‘He inferred that people are talking scandal of the Australian nurses and the soldiers and I was very cross about it.’
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Yet the perception would persist.

A few days later, Alice was selected to accompany badly injured troops back to Australia. She was given little notice, but had the chance to say goodbye to Frank before boarding the troopship
Ballarat
. Already another captain was trying to take liberties with her, driving her to the wharf at Alexandria and insisting on a farewell kiss in front of another nurse. Alice dismissed him as ‘more touched than I thought’. All around her, men were seeking reassurance and solace from the sisters. When the wounded began to arrive, the reason became clearer. Even Alice was stunned. ‘It was terrible. Such a lot of arms and legs missing. Blind boys and deaf boys and chest cases and spine cases. It was just heart breaking.’
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At No. 2 Australian General Hospital at Ghezireh Palace Hotel in Cairo, Olive Haynes was dealing with two typhus cases following an outbreak of the disease in the Dardanelles trenches. But the men in her ward had other things on their minds—they wanted to escape to the Wazzir at night. Olive was exasperated. ‘The wretched men coming in at all hours—it’s no use reporting them. The [Officer Commanding] is too soft.’
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The officer in turn blamed the sisters for not being strict enough. Meanwhile, the wounded were a constant stream of sorrow. Fifty came in during one night, 180 another. By mid-June, Olive was ‘feeling tired as 60 cats’.

When Elsie Eglinton finished night shift on 4 June, she was given two hours’ notice that she was to sail to the Dardanelles to help bring back wounded to Alexandria. She boarded the
Dunluce Castle
—‘a beautiful ship, but only a transport, not a painted Hospital Ship as she sometimes carries troops’. Fortune smiled on them during the voyage to Lemnos. ‘A big troopship coming along behind us was torpedoed. We did not go to her assistance as it is against the rules, ’ Elsie noted in her diary.
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In the months ahead, other nurses would not be so lucky.

Among the wounded were men suffering from dysentery and typhoid, their guts turned to water, running high temperatures and screaming for a drink. After three weeks on Lemnos, Elsie returned to Alexandria with 100 typhus patients. Because the
Dunluce Castle
was not a hospital ship, she worked in semi-darkness at night. The experience was awful. ‘It is impossible to keep them all in bed, they are delirious and crawl around the deck the moment you turn your back.’
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Elsie became preoccupied with the condition of one of her delirious and raving patients. To calm him down, she went to give him opium pills.

The ward was half dark and I knelt down by his mattress which was on the floor and tried to get him to take them but he refused and said I was going to poison him. I went to another patient to stop him from getting up and when I was coming back he sprang out at me and gave me such a blow on the right arm which knocked me right across the deck. He said, ‘You won’t poison me now.’ It appears that he is a great pugilist and I was lucky to escape with a black arm but, poor boy, it brought him to himself and he was quite upset. He kept saying, ‘I hit poor sister, ’ whenever I go through his ward he says, ‘There is the poor sister which [
sic
] I nearly killed.’
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Around the same time in Cairo, Olive Haynes recounted another worrying incident. The Royal Field Ambulance was moving into a nearby camp, and a drunken member of the Army Medical Corps ‘knocked a nurse down’ who ‘was nearly killed in consequence’. Such incidents involving soldiers were accidental so far as the sisters were concerned. But nerves were fraying.

There was a poignant moment for Olive when 400 wounded were brought to the hospital. ‘One of the men asked if Sister [Lily] Campbell were here because he wanted to tell her about her brother being killed, and it was poor old Campbell herself he asked. It was such a shock, but she went on working just the same, ’ Olive observed.
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Lily’s brother was Trooper John Campbell of the 7th Light Horse, a farmer from the Richmond River area of northern New South Wales. He was killed in action on 28 June 1915 during an operation to prevent the Turks from reinforcing their position at Krithia. According to his army record, he ‘carried wounded men from [the] firing line under heavy fire until he himself was killed’. Another sister, May Tilton, recounted how Lily, after receiving the news, ‘bravely buried her sorrow and carried on smiling among the sick’.
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