The Other Anzacs (41 page)

Dear Aunt,

Just a few lines to let you know that I am still alive and in the best of health and so far have not received any injuries. The nearest shell landed about 20 yards away and a piece went through my coat sleeve. I do not want it any nearer than that. We are living in a tiny dugout, just room for two, but it’s fairly safe against anything but a direct hit from a shell. We have just about completed our time and hope to be A little more than a year later, they had been together again at Wimereaux. ‘My dear old orderly from Ghezireh Palace is in my ward, ’ Elsie wrote. ‘I like him better the more I see of him. He would work his fingers to the bone for the boys. He is so gentle and kind. He is longing to get into the line but I tell him he is too young to go up there. We call him “Hughie” but his name is Hewish.’
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Aged just nineteen, Hughie called Elsie ‘Aunt’. Now, in June 1917, he was up the line, along with his friend and fellow South Australian Ronald John ‘Joe’ Rowett, a private in the 43rd Battalion. relieved soon. We cannot complain because we have had quite an easy time this trip.

Isn’t it glorious weather and doesn’t it make you glad to see all the grass shooting up and to hear the birds whistling.

. . . I cannot tell you much about our camp life as we are always on the move and very seldom settle down in any place for more than a few days. I like this life a great deal better than the hospital and I am sorry I did not get out of it sooner than I did, but we could hardly help that.

Sincerely yours

E. Hewish, No. 8282.

P.S. Since writing this we were moved to another spot and it proved to be a very hot spot, it is where we are making advances but I cannot mention the name of the place. We had to carry across country continually being swept by the enemy shellfire. Joe was unfortunate enough to get hit in the head by a piece of shell and I think it just about bad enough for a ‘Blightie’. I only saw him for a few minutes after he was hit. He seemed to be pretty right then. I think he is one of the luckiest men alive, for had it not been for his helmet he would have certainly been killed.

We are just out for a rest or rather a sleep for it was impossible to sleep up there even if you had the time.

Well, I trust that I shall not meet with the same misfortune, so will close now.
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Joe Rowett was all right after his hit in the head and seems to have remained in the fighting. He too was friendly with Elsie, and they corresponded during the Ypres Offensive. Such scraps of contact with friends were important, because no one could know what lay ahead.

May Tilton’s fiancé was somewhere in the line when he heard that No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station at Brandhoek had been shelled on 21 August. Four days later, after May had moved to a Canadian clearing station at St Omer, he appeared. He had ridden sixty kilometres on a bike he found by the roadside. Fearing for her safety, he managed to get thirty-six hours’ leave to track her down. Desperately tired and in need of sleep, he found a bed in town and saw her the next day. That night the Germans came, making an ‘awful racket’ over St Omer. May, ‘too anxious and scared’ to rest in bed, walked about all night. Early the next morning her fiancé arrived, looking worried.

All that day, my poor dear seemed more than usually troubled, and fought hard to hide his feelings from me. At 7 p.m. he returned to the line. But his usual cheery manner before we parted was changed to a silence that frightened me to think what he was feeling. With my heart crying against the parting, I braced myself to regain the courage which had almost deserted me. To be strong was our only hope. He strode away, whistling a gay tune. Next day he wrote me all he could not say. My heart died as I read the words: ‘Every man has a premonition of his fate up here, before the end.’ I tried to keep before me, and remember, all the things he asked of me.
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May’s mood was made heavier that night when it started raining; it poured for a week. She knew that thousands of men, waiting in their trenches for the expected hop over, would drown if they lay down to sleep. Some were buried in mud, and when dug out were found dead. But May could not afford to dwell on her fiancé’s safety even if she wanted to; there was too much to do.

Some Australian divisions were resting behind the lines at Argues, three kilometres from St Omer, and they and the sisters took the chance to socialise. Many of the soldiers visited daily, and the sisters patched their clothes, knitted them socks and helped to cheer them up before they left in early September to march back to the line.

At Argues there was a hospital full of shell-shocked patients, but no sisters, and its commanding officer allowed May and her colleagues to visit and take the boys out. They would sit beside the canal, playing cards and reading, and dipping into hampers they took with them. Such respites were rare. The cobbled roads were crowded with arm-swinging and singing troops, and at night Fritz’s planes came, loaded with bombs. Late one night, a bomb fell in the midst of the sisters’ tents, leaving the canvas riddled with shrapnel holes big enough to put a fist through. Next morning May souvenired a jagged ten-centimetre piece of shrapnel, which she kept for the rest of her life.

In mid-September, May moved to No. 47 British Casualty Clearing Station at St Sixte in Belgium, as part of the preparations for the advance to capture Passchendaele, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde. The camp was huge and included two other clearing stations. After days of preliminary heavy shelling, the Germans were forced back on either side of the Ypres-Menin Road. By noon on the 20th, the Australians and British had won Menin Road and were at the edge of Polygon Wood. Some 5000 Australians were among the Allied casualty toll of up to 25, 000. In a sea of mud, the Australians moved onto Polygon Wood which the 4th and 5th Divisions captured. The wounded poured into the three hospitals, 200 at a time. There was only time to attend to urgent dressings and make them as comfortable as possible.

For May Tilton, 21 September was a day she would always remember as dreadful and full of foreboding. ‘I felt something had happened to spoil my life. I could not throw off the depression. Matron, chancing to notice my ghastly appearance, insisted on me going off duty for a couple of hours. I could not divulge my secret fear to her.’ That night no one could sleep for the roaring of the guns. May and several of her colleagues were called at 3 a.m. to open a new ward to cope with the rush of patients. Explosions from an air raid taxed their nerves. Being up and doing something was a relief. As the raids continued, some of the wounded were too ill to take much notice, while others, so overwrought they could scarcely lie in their beds, cried out: ‘Sister, give me an injection, quickly, before they come again. I can’t stand any more tonight.’

It was left to the sisters’ discretion whether to give morphia or stimulants. Unlike the general hospitals, the casualty clearing stations could order unlimited supplies of brandy, champagne and stout, and chicken—luxuries that the men loved. They deserved this at the very least, May thought. She had witnessed ‘such frightened expressions’ as she bent over them, working to relieve their pain, bathing their eyes with bicarbonate of soda and inserting cocaine solution to relieve the agony from mustard gas. Pads and bandages kept these patients in darkness. A sister worked continuously on each side of the ward, while yet more sisters tried to relieve patients’ distressed breathing by administering oxygen for ten minutes every half hour. They were unable to work in the gas wards for long. Stooping over patients, the nurses soon became affected by inhaling the residual gas. Their throats grew sore, their eyes smarted and watered. The odour of the ward would stay in their nostrils for weeks.

In early October, May and the other Australian sisters were recalled to No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, which had been re-established at Nine Elms, ten kilometres from Ypres. For her friend Elsie Grant, there was a pleasant surprise at Ypres. Her brother, 2nd Lieutenant Allan Herbert Grant of the 40th Battalion, had arrived there two hours before her. He knew Elsie was in the general area, but had no more information until he saw a transport carrying Australian sisters with her unit colours late at night. As he asked if any of them knew where Elsie was, the car she was in stopped and the first person she saw was Allan. ‘Really I thought to myself God must have sent him as a comfort after the day we had had. We all embraced him and the dear left at 5 a.m. next morning, ’ she wrote to a friend.
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Allan had laughed at Elsie’s fears and said he would be down to see her the first chance he got. In her letter, Elsie confided that she badly wanted ‘to come home on transport but I really can’t bring myself to leave Allan behind. That is the principle reason I don’t come’. Two months later, on 20 October, Elsie received a letter from a sergeant in Allan’s battalion.

It is with regret I take up my pen to write these few lines telling you that your Brother A.H. Grant was killed in action on the 12:10:17; but Sister is it not just consolation to know that he died a grand and noble death fighting for his God; King; Country and dear ones. I had not met your brother prior to his joining our Battn (40th) but he was so jolly; full of sport; and good natured that he was soon known and loved by all the boys, in fact his platoon used to just idolise him and I too used to love to get a chat with him. The night prior to the Stunt which as it happened to be his last I was talking to him for quite a long while, and as I was being left out of the Stunt, he gave me his wallet, a letter and paper to you . . . He asked me as a favor if anything did happen [to] him to forward these articles on to you, which I am duly doing and trust the parcel will reach you safely . . . I know Sister it is hard to part with our dear loved ones, but still think what a grand and noble death his was and truly a better and braver Soldier than he could never be. He was loved by all and I ask you to accept our deepest sympathy in you great loss.
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Aged twenty-eight, Allan was shot in the head while attacking a German pillbox at Passchendaele. He was buried where he fell.

The advance up the line took a heavy toll. In the first twenty-four hours about 3000 patients were admitted to No. 3 Clearing Station. Hospital trains stood by and carried the wounded away as fast as the sisters could get them ready. They had time to attend only the worst cases. The resuscitation ward resembled a butcher’s shop; those who were conscious smiled grimly, glad to be wounded and out of the fighting. Annie Shadforth was at No. 3 and shuddered at the sight of the terrible injuries. She thought she had ‘seen horrific wounds and badly gassed patients until I looked on the [boys] at the CCS.’ The ‘poor boys died like flies . . . I felt that I must pull myself together otherwise I would be sent back to the base. I didn’t want to go back. I was convinced it was a CCS that needed skilled women, ’ she recalled later.
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The pressure on the sisters was immense.

Ordered to grab a few hours’ rest, May Tilton and another sister were groping their way along the duckboards one rainy night when they slipped into what they thought was an empty ward. Tripping over a stretcher, they found the floor covered with a mass of wounded. Men were being sick, moaning in pain, or crying out for a drink. Many pleaded for their boots to be removed. The two sisters set to work, lifting the stretchers into some sort of order and searching for haemorrhage cases while other wounded men held torches to guide them. When their backs would hold up no longer, they sat on the floor and cut the boots and socks off the men’s stone-cold and swollen feet, wrapping them in bundles of cotton wool and bandages. All the while, the guns roared, and 5.9-inch shells screamed overhead. On 4 October 1917, in the midst of the Battle of Broodseinde, May wrote:

We hated and dreaded the days that followed this incessant thundering, when the torn, bleeding and pitifully broken human beings were brought in, their eyes filled with horror and pain; those who could walk staggering dumbly, pitifully, in the wrong direction. Days later men were carried in who had been found lying in shell-holes, starved, cold, and pulseless, but, by some miracle, still alive. Many died of exposure and the dreaded gas gangrene.