The Other Anzacs (9 page)
Some of the doctors and orderlies had been on duty for days and nights without sleep. Among Elsie’s patients was one young soldier aged just twenty-one, who had been shot in the face and lost both eyes when the 8th Battalion landed at Gallipoli. ‘He sits up in bed and sings or jokes to keep the others cheerful. He calls himself “my little blind boy”, his name is Elmer Glew. He is a true hero. As soon as he hears my footstep at night he calls out “Saceda” which means in Arabic a salute or blessing. I’m just trying to work on and on and not think of the awful things which are happening around me.’
Elsie’s friend Olive Haynes was at No. 2 Australian General Hospital at Mena House, about eighteen kilometres from Cairo, when the first trainload of more than 100 wounded troops were admitted on the 30th. A week later the hospital would be relocated to the larger Ghezireh Palace Hotel, about three kilometres from the centre of Cairo, with Mena becoming a convalescent depot. In a letter to her mother Olive recounted how splendidly the Anzacs had fought, but said it was dreadful to think of how many were not coming back: the 9th and 11th Battalions ‘have just about been wiped out’. It was terrible, but ‘we are proud of Australia . . . Nobody can rest, ’
4
she said, noting that there were beds everywhere in the hall and on the verandahs.
Sister Emma Cuthbert was working at No. 1 Australian General Hospital at Heliopolis when the first evacuees arrived in the foyer of the former hotel. They were given hot cocoa and biscuits while their name and Army number were taken and the nature of their wound recorded. They were then allotted to the various wards, where they had a bath and were given a change of clothes. These were mostly the less serious cases, and they feared for their more badly wounded comrades. ‘We know they are badly wounded Sister, we saw them lying there in the field waiting for help, when we were just able to walk or crawl away.’
5
As Emma Cuthbert described it, the impact on the nurses was overwhelming.
The strain and rush of work and keeping up supplies of dressings was terrific, and many a badly wounded boy would arrive only half clad, and the whole situation was so new to us, that many a Sister, when the badly wounded first arrived, had to at times suddenly disappear into the pantry to control her feelings for these poor suffering boys, and their wonderful patience and endurance, and kindly sympathy and care for each other, really seemed to make it harder for the women to bear.
6
Alice Kitchen was also at No. 1 Australian General Hospital when the first batches of the wounded were admitted. ‘One dreads to hear who next has gone.’
7
Two days later, on 3 May, she observed that many men had limb injuries.
One poor lad had to have his leg amputated, gangrene from injury to main artery, I fancy. Most of them think the casualties were heavier than anticipated but it is very difficult to really know. Many think 6000 about the number, but one man told me 8000 would be nearer the mark. There will be grief and sorrow in many a home and I am afraid few of the 1st AIF will return except as cripples. It is all too dreadful and every day we hear of someone we knew being killed or wounded.
Keeping professional detachment was a struggle. ‘Everyone has felt the awful strain of the last week, ’ Alice confessed. ‘If we had been nursing strange troops we may have felt it less, but among our own people the horrors of war are brought home to one more intensely. Almost everyone on the staff has some relation or friend at the front and so you are constantly dreading to hear the latest news.’
8
Daisy Richmond reached Alexandria on the
Guildford Castle
on the morning of 4 May, and spent the rest of the day disembarking the wounded. The lighter cases went to Cairo. ‘Such a muddle as there appears to be amongst the medical authorities. There have been so many places opened and there seem to be no staff to run them.’
9
Because of this, some wounded had to be sent to Port Said, and this distressed Daisy. ‘Dear fellows, how I hate them leaving under such conditions to be looked after mostly by untrained people, I just wish I could remain with them.’
10
A day later, she was headed back to the Dardanelles.
Alice
Ross King finally found time to open her diary again on 8 May. ‘It is 10 days since I touched this book. What days!’ On 28 April—three days after the Gallipoli landing—200 ‘very sick’ troops had arrived from Lemnos and been taken to the Australian Auxiliary Hospital at Luna Park, a former Cairo amusement park where Alice had helped set up a convalescent depot. She arrived at Luna Park to find the skating rink filled with 500 cheap splitbamboo beds. Crammed onto the rink, and in a pavilion that had previously housed such sideshows as the skeleton house and scenic railway, they looked like chicken coops. In this bizarre environment, the operating theatre was set up in a former ticket office, less than twelve square metres in area. The medical staff lined the walls with mosquito netting to keep out the dust and flies. The equipment included a primus stove and two stools.
Within two hours of their arrival, Alice and her colleagues had 300 patients, all convalescents from the general hospital at Heliopolis Palace Hotel. The sisters worked frantically to make up beds, assign the patients and prepare diet sheets. That workload alone was ‘almost overpowering’, according to Alice. But it was a mere prelude. An hour later, the wounded began to arrive in droves. ‘I shall never forget the shock when we saw the men arrive covered in blood most of them with half their uniform shot or torn away. We found then that 700 badly wounded had arrived.’ With one sister still to come on duty, Alice and her two colleagues and two orderlies were responsible for more than 500 patients by nightfall. ‘The meals had to be got and the wounded were clamouring to be dressed.’ This had not been done for four days. When it was time for tea, the men rushed the barriers ‘and those who were strongest got the most tea. It was a wild beast show.’
There was no pause in the admissions, with men coming in several at a time. There was no storage room, so they had to put their kits, stiff with blood and crawling with lice, under the beds. The atmosphere was heavy with the stench of wounded soldiers who had not had proper baths for many days. Basic equipment was nonexistent. The nurses found an onion at the bottom of a large jug of water that they had thought was sterile. Servants who had no idea of such concepts had brought it in from the cookhouse. There were no antiseptics, and kerosene tins had to be converted into arm and foot baths, and even dressing trays.
By the 30th, Luna Park was in turmoil. ‘They had rushed the food at breakfast time and the temper of the ward was very ugly, ’ Alice noted. ‘The men were hanging out on the street buying from the natives.’ The staff worked to restore order, discharging 300 patients to a convalescent camp. That left 780 ‘pretty sick’ patients in what had become a badly ventilated, stuffy and foul-smelling overflow hospital instead of a convalescent depot. Alice was worked off her feet. ‘I must have done 400 dressings that day, no pause for refreshments.’ That night troops who had been at Gallipoli since the first landings began arriving, including some from Frank Smith’s 13th Battalion. No news, however, of Frank. ‘I’m longing and longing to know about him, ’ Alice wrote in her diary, adding that everyone was shocked by the terrible wounds. ‘The boys are such bricks about it too.’
The next day five regimental doctors from the Light Horse arrived. Alice established four dressing stations, with a doctor and two bandagers placed at each station, while she worked at another. They completed 800 dressings, extracting bullets where necessary. Most of the wounds were flyblown, and some were so severe that it was clear that amputation would be necessary. Some of the men were beyond nursing. Alice went to bed heartbroken by their suffering. ‘They were lying there in misery and some so weak and miserable the tears were flowing. The flies swarmed over them and the heat was suffocating and we could not get enough food for them.’
Next day, twenty-three Australian sisters who had been en route to England were intercepted at Suez and brought to Luna Park to help out. Alice and her colleagues returned to Heliopolis Palace Hotel. In four days they had treated more than 1000 patients. ‘It was chaos but that we were able to do it at all was wonderful, ’ she wrote with some satisfaction. ‘The administration, after the first two days, was good. Everybody got a certain amount of food. All had their dressings done and their beds made and a wash.’ Luna Park now had 1200 decently equipped beds. More had to be added soon after, filling the caves and scenic railways that had once held shrieking fun-seekers.
Back at No. 1 General Hospital, Alice was immediately assigned to a surgical ward. The cases were terrible. ‘Legs and arms off. One man in [ward] 10 with his jaw and part of his neck blown away—they have to nasal feed him. Many amputations, great big sloughing wounds.’ She concluded that three head cases were going to die, while there were two spinal cases ‘without a hope’. While the troops were ‘bonny boys’, Alice was far less impressed by the behaviour of three men in a designated officers’ ward. ‘These officers are disgusting. They will not attempt to do a thing for themselves although only slightly injured. In the general officers wards the boys are bricks—but these three are behaving very badly. One is a New Zealander.’
More auxiliary convalescent depots were quickly established. No. 2 auxiliary was in the Atelier, in a building previously used as a furniture factory, where machinery and the overhead apparatus for removing sawdust were still in position. The asbestos roof was high, ventilation was poor, and low-quality beds were jammed twenty abreast on the rough tile floor. Problems common to all the hospitals were overcrowding, poor ventilation and shoddy beds that either broke or had to be destroyed because of vermin. Recovery for the Australian and New Zealand convalescents was at best uncomfortable. But of the sisters they had no complaints.
The gruelling workload and appalling injuries tested the ability of the nurses to remain professionally detached. After one of the theatre nurses broke down under the stress, Alice took her place. Already ‘nearly knocked out’ from the demands of work on the wards and long hours, she too was soon near breaking point. ‘I could not look or speak to anybody without crying, ’ she wrote. During one shift, the theatre matron realised she needed a rest and told her to go off duty for six hours. The four sisters running the theatre toiled in fifteen-hour shifts, with Alice working from 3 p.m. to 6 a.m. Operations were mostly performed in the afternoon and at night, with three operating tables going at once. Mistakes occurred. A young surgeon ‘made an awful mess’ of a couple of cases. Two of the patients died.
The Light Horsemen were being dismounted and sent as infantry to the Dardanelles. Alice knew one of them, and he came around to say goodbye. ‘He is funking it badly.’ Another also visited, wanting her to go out with him, but ‘I have no time for affairs of that sort just now.’ That night, Alice assisted with operations until 1 a.m., but at least the next day brought news from Frank that he was all right. Alice was realistic enough to know that since he wrote the note, on 19 April, ‘anything might have happened’.
11
That was the universal fear among the sisters. They all seemed to know someone, either a relative, a friend from Australia or someone they had met in Egypt, whose fate was unknown. Rumour and speculation about the well-being of many of the troops swirled through the hospital wards.
The nurses shared this aching void while trying to get through the long hours and tend ghastly injuries for which no training could have prepared them. Thanks to the manifestly inadequate preparation of facilities by the Army hierarchy, the sisters had been thrown in at the deep end, but they had responded with courage and intelligence, whatever their personal reactions might have been. The nurses, like the men, had been blooded. Thus began the mutual respect between the Anzacs and the sisters who would care for them over the next four years.
