The Other Anzacs (44 page)

Verdun was the prize Germany wanted. If France could be defeated at the fortress city, the psychological impact would be enormous. But the French were not going to give it up. ‘
Ils ne passeront pas!
’ was their defiant pledge. The battle began on 21 February 1916, and would last until the week before Christmas that year. It would become the longest single battle of the war, with more than 377, 000 casualties, including 162, 000 men killed or missing. France’s medical and nursing capabilities could not cope with the enormity of the carnage and were in danger of a complete breakdown.

Aware of this shortage, the New South Wales division of the Red Cross offered its sister organisation, the Croix-Rouge, twenty Australian nurses to be sent directly to military hospitals in France. The French readily accepted, but added that the sisters should speak French and be adaptable to ‘primitive’ conditions. Curiously, the Australian Jockey Club became a financial partner with the Red Cross in this venture. The club, under pressure to stop racing for the duration of the war, offered to support the nurses for six months.

Elsie Cook was one of eighty applicants. On her return from Egypt in March 1916 she had been placed on home service at No. 4 Australian General Hospital in Randwick. Her husband, Syd, was also in Sydney recovering from the gunshot wound to his head that had almost killed him at Lone Pine. He was close to returning to active duty. Knowing that the Australian Army Nursing Service held no future for her now she was married, Elsie was determined to find a way back to the war.

Thanks to her experience, she was among those chosen to go with the Red Cross contingent to France. In mid-1916 she resigned from the Army Nursing Service and, just five days later, sailed from Woolloomooloo on the Hospital Ship
Kanowna
, bound for England. The Defence Department granted the nurses free passage—with the stipulation that the sisters were totally in the care of the Red Cross, which had agreed to pay them at the same rate as Army staff nurses. The move was a cynical one, as it absolved the Commonwealth of all responsibility for the nurses on their return to Australia.
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The Red Cross sisters could be distinguished from their Army nursing colleagues by their uniform, a dark blue shirt and jacket with pale blue piping, and a dark blue hat. They quickly became known as the Bluebirds. A French teacher travelled with them, giving three lessons a day. The same month the Bluebirds left Sydney,
Kai Tiaki
in New Zealand noted their departure and reported press approval of the decision to send them, given the ‘wonderful heroism’ of the French soldiers in the face of the German battering at Verdun, which was ‘draining the manhood of France’.

Kai Tiaki
added that New Zealander Ella Cooke, now with the Imperial Military Nursing Service in Alexandria, had served with the French Flag Nursing Corps at Bernay. The matron in charge of the corps—which would later be taken over by the French Croix-Rouge—travelled up and down the Western Front seeing the nurses and smoothing out difficulties. Some Frenchmen thought the English nurses ‘washed their patients too much . . . [Matron] explained the different national outlook to one doctor, saying that in England a bath was a daily necessity, in France an anniversary.’
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Just what effect this assertion may have had on Anglo-French relations went unrecorded.

When the Bluebirds reached England in late August 1916, arrangements were made to send them to military hospitals in France. In London, Elsie’s father-in-law, former Prime Minister Joe Cook, visited unexpectedly and took her to dinner at the fashionable restaurant Frescatis and to a show at the Palladium. Elsie arrived with Lillian Fraser Thompson. Fraser, as she was called, had long wanted to go to the war but appears to have believed that the Army Nursing Service would not be sending any more nurses for a while. She had come to this view after receiving a letter from her medical officer brother, Captain Clive Thompson, who had risked his life under a hail of bullets at Gallipoli to attend the mortally wounded General Bridges. He wrote that there was a belief among the medical corps in Egypt ‘that no more nurses were to be brought from Australia for some time as there are more than are required here already’.
³
Fraser joined the Bluebirds instead.

No sooner had they arrived than Fraser was reunited with her Army medical officer fiancé, Captain Gordon ‘Nubby’ FitzHill. They decided to marry, and two days later drove to Salisbury for the wedding, in a quaint, ivy-covered Norman church. The wedding breakfast was no grand affair, just a simple lunch at a little country inn, but in the midst of a war it was something to be cherished.

The Bluebirds were posted in pairs, and Elsie and Fraser were sent to a convalescent hospital, No. 74 Hospital at Cannes, where they arrived on 12 September 1916. Like their fellow Bluebirds elsewhere in provincial France, they were unimpressed by what they saw. ‘Very down hearted and depressed at the state of things here—our first dinner with the staff awful— had to quit hurriedly and go to the Hotel for dinner, ’ Elsie wrote.
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Nellie Crommelin, a thirty-four-year-old nurse from Bombala on the New South Wales south coast, was another Bluebird who, too, was exasperated that the French authorities were yet to take their presence seriously. She had already experienced nursing in a war hospital in England at the outbreak of the war, before returning to Australia in late 1915. The Bluebirds gave her the opportunity to return to the war. Posted to Auxiliary Hospital 117 at Les Andelys, west of Paris, she was immediately at home among the French, if not the administration of the hospital system. While she liked the patients under her care, there were nonetheless some challenges.

[The men] are very dear and good—like to be fussed over and petted and spoiled and coaxed just like our English Tommies and they are of course naturally very polite and nice in their manner—though I’m sorry to say they don’t seem to know the use of baths, toothbrushes etc. Also they expectorate profusely just wherever they happen to be—especially in the ward—for they sit round one anothers [
sic
] beds playing cards and the floor for yards all round beggars description.
⁵

If the conditions in the wards were dirty, the administration was another issue altogether. Nellie noted that there was ‘absolutely no method—no management. No order in any one single department. It is deplorable. Everything is so dirty it sickens you and of course we’ve no authority to make anything clean. I wish they’d turn the place over to us. It would give us a chance of proving our work to our Red X.’
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Elsie Cook was dismayed by the backwardness of the French system, with its cold and unclean hospitals lacking the sanitary standards of Australian hospitals. ‘French hospitals are very queer and amazingly badly off for properly trained people.’ Elsie had sixty patients in her ward and found her ‘lack of the French tongue most trying’.

Language aside, they were not as challenged as they wanted to be. They felt frustrated being so far from the fighting on the Western Front. Elsie told the French War Office and the Croix-Rouge president that she and Fraser wanted to be sent north into the Army zone. In Australia, the Red Cross executive committee met to consider the Bluebirds’ predicament and decided to cable London. The Croix-Rouge immediately agreed to transfer Elsie and Fraser to a hospital in Paris, but they were still not satisfied. Elsie cabled back insisting that she and Fraser be sent to the front.

Soon afterwards, a phone call summoned them to the War Office, where they were given orders to a French officers’ hospital in Amiens, Hospital 108. Their arrival coincided with an Allied push, from the end of January 1917, in which several important ridges and towns near Bapaume were won back from the Germans. Raids by German aircraft were frequent around Amiens, and even the hospital courtyard had been bombed. Elsie noted that sandbags were everywhere, in case of bombardment.

Elsie had a rude introduction to life near the front that first night. ‘About 4 a.m. we were awakened by the firing of our anti-aircraft guns and two bombs were dropped—we arose affrighted and hastily donned a cloak and slippers and fled to the cellar—where after a long cold wait, things passed and we retired to bed.’
⁷
They went on duty in two wards, each with thirty-two officers under her care. Initially not very busy, they waited to begin work in the operating theatre when the next push began to drive the Germans from Bapaume. Serendipitously, Australian troops were based nearby at Fricourt, and Syd Cook was among them. He made a surprise visit on a twenty-four-hour leave pass. It had been nearly nine months since he and Elsie had last seen each other in Sydney. ‘Perfectly splendid to see him again, ’ she enthused.
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Two weeks later, despite the risk of shelling and gas, Elsie wanted to go to the front line. Driving through Albert, thirty kilometres away, she witnessed the damage caused by German bombardment and shelling only a few days earlier. The drive ended at Fricourt, and Elsie found to her ‘delight and surprise’ that Syd was just out of the lines. ‘Gave him a great surprise— had lunch in his hut.’
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Syd organised another day’s leave and they set off for Amiens to the sound of guns booming and flashing, and shellbursts lighting the horizon. Elsie had been about seven kilometres from the Australian front-line trenches and about eight from Bapaume. Perhaps Syd’s presence had momentarily inured her to the danger, for she concluded that 6 March had been ‘a lovely day’.

Elsie was conscious that her husband twice had been wounded at Gallipoli and that without her personal intervention he might well have died. Now they were both in France on the Western Front. Except for their honeymoon in September 1914, they had not been together for any length of time. Since the euphoria of joining up, there had been nothing in their lives but war. Their naïve belief that it would be over quickly was long forgotten. Now, there seemed no end to it. The war had become a way of life, with its own patterns and pressures, madness and mayhem. Amid the chaos they had to create their own version of normalcy, and that required ingenuity, luck and determination. Above all, it required commitment from them both. At a time when communications were haphazard, there were few certainties Elsie and Syd could rely on to keep the flame alive.

For Syd, the opportunity to stay with Elsie in her lodgings in Amiens must have seemed like an extraordinary luxury after the rats, mud and death of the trenches. Elsie and Fraser had decorated the flat with pictures, made lampshades and pasted new wallpaper. On 26 March 1917, Syd arrived on twenty-four-hours’ leave and in time for lunch. He and Elsie sat by the fire placing photos in an album. They shopped for that night’s meal ‘and had a lovely party in our ménage, the fire in the middle of the dinner’. Five days later Syd arrived again and announced that he was being sent to England. With Syd gone, Elsie and two Australian nurses from No. 2 General Hospital at Boulogne, and two fellow Bluebirds, had supper together. Even though they were in different services, the barriers did not diminish old friendships.

The Battle of Bullecourt in mid-April resulted in huge losses for the Australian troops involved. The attack was hastily planned and mounted, with the two brigades of the Australian 4th Division that carried out the attack, the 4th and 12th, suffering more than 3300 casualties and losing nearly 1200 men as prisoners of war. The battle also brought 1500 wounded French troops to Amiens. Elsie’s hospital was full. Nearby, Hospital 111 needed more nurses, and Elsie and Fraser were sent. They had 250 patients to look after, and worked all day doing dressings. Another 100 wounded came the next day. The work did not stop. Nellie Crommelin at Les Andelys wrote to her mother that sometimes when the new men came in she could not ‘see their wounds thro’ my tears—for it breaks my heart to see them suffering so simply from neglect—yards of dressings plastered on in any kind of fashion and underneath filthy hands or feet and nails which have not been cleaned or cut’.
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In rectifying this, the Bluebirds brought a professionalism that was in sharp contrast to the semi-trained and even untrained women who staffed the hospitals.

After some initial ambivalence about the Bluebirds, the Red Cross wrote to Elsie and Fraser to renew their contracts. Neither would have had it any other way. Elsie applied for a month’s leave in England, where she joined Syd. They rented a flat, rode bikes through Dorset, Devon and Cornwall in the early English summer and, for one of the few times since their honeymoon, had a chance to enjoy, if only briefly, something approaching normal life. It was a ‘sad day’ when their leave ended. Back in Amiens, Elsie did not find it easy to settle back into being Sister Cook again, but Fraser had organised new lodgings and friends were soon calling.

A week of lectures on the Carrel-Dakin treatment of wounds was followed by the 5th Divisional Sports day at Henencourt Woods on 4 July. ‘Ever so many people we knew there, ’ Elsie noted. Among them were General Pompey Elliott, Generals Smith, Tivey and Hopkirk, Captain Hamilton and the entire 14th Field Ambulance. ‘We were presented to General Birdwood, had tea, guests of 14th Brigade and General Hopkirk.’ She also noted that several sisters from No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station were there. If meeting Birdwood was an honour for Elsie and her fellow Bluebirds, there was another in store. Eight days later, at the Artillery and 5th Division Sports, again at Henencourt, they were presented to King George V. In England, Syd saw a newspaper photo of Elsie with the King and sent her a cutting. In a letter to the
Sydney Morning Herald
, Elsie said the King had shaken hands with her, Fraser Thompson, Frida Warner and Fanny Harris and asked how it was that they were working in French hospitals. ‘So we explained that as France needed trained nurses, the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Red Cross had sent us as a gift to France to nurse the French wounded.’
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