The Other Anzacs (4 page)

Elsie Cook fared just as badly. ‘Very fed up with sea life and silently vow never to put foot on a boat again and never to go forth to a war again, ’ she wrote.
¹³
But a few days later she was able to breakfast in the saloon, where the troops were rehearsing for an afternoon concert. ‘Efforts sounding rather more energetic and persevering than musical, but very entertaining, ’ she observed.
¹⁴
For vibrant young women in the first innocent days of the war, life on a troopship could be fun.

Soon the nurses were getting their sea legs and coming to terms with the overcrowding and poor food, and preparing for a shipboard Christmas. When the
Kyarra
left Fremantle on 13 December, Elsie Cook ‘stayed on deck and sadly watched the very last bit of Australia vanish into the night, wondering how long, and what lay before me, before I should see Australian shores again’.

Amid deck games and dances, French classes and boat drills, spirits were high. At the fancy-dress ball on New Year’s Eve, Daisy Richmond dressed as a grandmother and thought the festivities ‘really splendid considering the material we had to hand’. Elsie Cook went as a mermaid, wrapped in shimmering green-grey silk. ‘Wore my hair loose with a wreath of seaweed [and] pineapple leaves from the dinner table on my head, ’ she noted. The party ended at midnight with a rendition of
Auld Lang Syne
.

And so ended 1914. What an eventful year! My engagement, marriage, finishing my training and old life at Prince Alfred Hospital, the outbreak of the Great War, my joining the Army Nursing Service and leaving home and Australia for the first time! Very eventful. As we stood and watched the old year die and vanish, I regretted to part with it, and hated to see it go. New Year’s Day dawned as we stood and watched the old year out and New Year in on the deck of the
Kyarra
. A gloriously moonlit morning. Calm and beautiful, everyone bright and happy and so begins 1915. It seems a good omen.
¹⁵

In Bernay, France, New Zealand Sister Ella Cooke was having a very different New Year. On the Western Front, soldiers were shivering in frozen trenches, many stricken with trench foot. In the past few weeks Ella had seen enough to know that the war that was stirring Britons and their allies to patriotic fervour held horrors that not even a Christmas card from King George V to every soldier, sailor and nurse could hide.

Fate had dealt Ella a strange hand. Six months earlier, at the age of twenty-nine, she and her twin sister had left Auckland for Canada and the United States en route to England. But then Britain declared war on Germany. Ella had grown up among people who called England ‘Home’, and once there she offered her services as a nurse. Not needed, she crossed the Channel in November to serve as a volunteer with the French Flag Nursing Corps. She was paid no salary, merely a sufficient allowance for board and lodging.

Ella saw men with sickening wounds, deep and long, from the bullets, bombs and shrapnel that tore to the bone. No one back home could possibly comprehend what the war meant, she wrote in a letter to the New Zealand nurses’ journal,
Kai Tiaki
;
¹⁶
they would have to see ‘these poor suffering men’ to understand. Many had been in the trenches for weeks, and some had not had their boots off since the war began four months earlier in the warmth of summer. ‘You can imagine the state they are. Many have swollen feet and frozen up to the ankles; most I am afraid, will lose both feet, and many the legs up to the knee, ’ she wrote.

Wounded Arab soldiers, fighting for the French, brought the war right into Ella’s ward. ‘Unless they kill a man outright and cut off his head they don’t believe he is really dead. One Arab travelled all the way from the firing line with a German’s head in his possession. One day there was an awful smell in his room, and a German’s head was found under his bed!’

New Zealand nurse Zillah Jones was working with British Army nurses on the hospital ship
Carisbrook Castle
, sailing between France and England. Along with English soldiers, she tended some German wounded. Despite the news of German atrocities in Belgium, Zillah saw unusual camaraderie among the men, regardless of nationality. ‘Our men are most awfully good to [the Germans] on the boat. I have seen them shave them, help them off with their boots, and give them cigarettes.’
¹⁷

A story she heard from a wounded German sniper underlined the poignancy of that first festive season of the war. British infantrymen were astonished on Christmas Eve to see Germans erecting Christmas trees with candles and paper lanterns on the parapets of their trenches. A truce was declared and there was much singing of carols, hymns and popular songs, and even meetings in some areas. The German soldier told Zillah about meeting British troops on this extraordinary Christmas Day. He said one of them had told him that ‘the Kaiser was done for now’. The German had just laughed and shaken his head as both sides went about collecting and burying their dead in no man’s land. He described how tokens and addresses had been exchanged in an oddly relaxed atmosphere. In a letter home, Zillah recounted what she had learned of the Christmas truce.

Some of the men had been exchanging Woodbines [cigarettes] with the Germans for rank cigars on Christmas Day, and some of them had even taken tea with the enemy, but they took good care that the Germans drank some first—they were taking no risks. One said: ‘When are you going to pack up and go home. We are fed up. I live in London and want to get back.’ And another said: ‘Can’t think why you don’t go home; you know you are beaten.’ They then shook hands, wished each other a Merry Christmas, went back to their trenches, and started shooting at each other.
¹⁸

The reality of the war—which in the next four years would bring a death toll of 20 million troops and civilians—was not yet grasped by anyone, whether in a lounge room in Australia and New Zealand, a trench or hospital in France, aboard a hospital ship, or in an Anzac camp in Egypt.

2
RELATIVE RELATIONS

Sister Alice Ross King had always wanted to be a nurse.
¹
Perhaps it was because she had seen tragedy in her own family. She was a toddler when her storekeeper father moved the family from Ballarat to Perth in search of a better life in the late 1880s. It was there that he and two brothers drowned in a fishing accident on the Swan River. Alice returned to Melbourne with her mother and completed her education at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College.

Not old enough to start nursing training, she worked for some time assisting the matron of the Austin Hospital, but moved to the Alfred Hospital when a typhoid epidemic caused a shortage of nurses. After completing her training, Alice moved back to the Austin Hospital, where she became night superintendent. Further experience as a theatre sister and then matron of a private hospital meant that at twenty-seven, she brought a wealth of experience to the Australian Army Nursing Service.

As they left Australia, Alice and her fellow nurses on the
Kyarra
thought they were going to England and France, but their arrival in Egypt coincided with a shift in war strategy. By the start of 1915, a stalemate had developed on the Western Front, the opposing sides facing each other along a line of trenches stretching through France from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. In the Middle East, the dynamics were also changing. The Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire, which was an integral part of the European balance of power, had joined Germany. Russia, aligned with the Allies, was struggling to keep Turkish forces from invading through the Caucasus. The Russians appealed to Britain to mount a diversionary attack to draw the Turks away.

On 15 January 1915, the War Council convened a meeting in London that was to immediately affect the lives of Anzac nurses and troops in Egypt. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, proposed a naval attack on the forts guarding the Dardanelles, the fifty-kilometre strait linking the Aegean Sea to the inland Sea of Marmara. Control of the Dardanelles and conquest of the Turkish capital of Constantinople would break the stalemate that had developed in the war, Churchill argued. Despite some reservations, the council gave the plan the go-ahead.

Word travelled quickly to Cairo, where the next day Elsie Cook recorded in her diary, ‘Strong rumours that we are to stay in Egypt.’ At lunch, the nurses were told officially that they were. No. 1 Australian General Hospital would be established at the luxury, four-storey Heliopolis Palace Hotel in the Cairo suburb of Abbassia. No. 2 Australian General Hospital would be set up at Mena House, a former hunting lodge that had recently been turned into another luxury hotel. ‘Couldn’t be a better arrangement, ’ Elsie wrote approvingly, clearly not interested in travelling to England when her husband Syd was nearby. That afternoon, Elsie walked down the newly made ‘Canberra Road’ to Mena Camp and met up with Syd. They walked over the hill to the Pyramids before riding donkeys down to the Sphinx.

Elsie observed that the majority of nurses were pleased to be staying, ‘for most of us have someone in Camp’. Not only did the nurses want to be where they could be of most help to their soldiers, but they also wanted to be close to those they cared for. And the men wanted them there. ‘Wherever our men were they cheered us and we them, ’ Daisy Richmond noted.
²
From the time they arrived in Egypt, the sisters and the men sought each other out. With the call to battle imminent, the troops were happy to have the women of their homeland there to socialise with and, all too soon, to tend them in hospital.

It did not matter how ill they were, whenever they saw a strange Sister, their first question was, ‘What part of Australia do you come from?’ They all seemed to crave so for the company of some one who might know something of home.
³

And often this turned to flirting. Alice Ross King captured the mood in her earliest diary entries. While noted for her nursing skill and strength of character, the slim twenty-seven-year-old was also vivacious, and her brown eyes expressed a ready sense of humour. Freed from the social confines of Edwardian Melbourne, she took happily to the heady atmosphere of Cairo.

A keen observer of people, Alice noticed both real and imagined fraternisation between nurses and officers. On 17 January 1915 she wrote that she was ‘very interested’ in a particular captain, but she believed his eyes were for someone else. Two days later she noted that her ‘conjectures’ had been mistaken. But by then, she had promised to go on a drive with another officer, ‘a nice fresh youth’. Alice’s attentions soon drifted again. ‘Capt. S. attentions becoming noticed. [Sister] Connolly given me several digs about it today. Went up town with Sister Cuthbert—met an awfully nice man attached to our unit on the return trip. Wrote letters and dodged Capt. S. all the evening.’
⁴

Mixing duty with romance in this exotic yet dangerous new environment became a focus for many of the nurses. It helped to have brothers and cousins, male friends and boyfriends in Egypt. In Cairo on 21 January, Kath King, Elsie Cook, Grace ‘Tom’ Thompson and several of their colleagues from Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital were invited by two officers to join them on a camel ride to the Step Pyramid at Sakkara and the great necropolis of Memphis. Kath was gregarious and enjoyed the company of the officers. Two days later, at a ‘bonser dinner’ at the Continental Hotel, she, Tom and two officers listened to music until late. ‘The boys were great and were jolly pleased to see Tom and me again, ’ she enthused. They were spending as much time as they could with the officers, who were likewise eager to issue invitations and visit them at No. 2 Australian General Hospital, often unannounced, in the hope of a chat and a cup of tea. The officers came to see Kath and Tom, ‘but we were both on duty’.