A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front Read Online Free Page B

his beatitude.
    Unfortunately, there are times when our little nonsense talk of welcome is stilled, when we hurry round – or send an orderly – to see that each case is comfortable, while we give our whole attention to one in particular. For he has come in with the ominous, red-bordered field-card and the syllable ‘Sev.’ following the diagnosis, e.g. ‘G.S.W. rt. humerus sev. cpd. frac. rt. femur,’ indicating a gunshot wound of a severe character and a compound fracture. Possibly the journey to hospital has aggravated the poor boy’s injuries, the jolting of car or carriage may have brought on a haemorrhage or has exhausted strength already much enfeebled.
    More blankets and hot water bottles, the saline bag and the hypodermic needle play their part or, perhaps, after the consultation comes an immediate visit to the theatre, or perhaps … ‘All you can do, sister, is to make him comfortable. A third of a grain of morphia …’
    Then follow some of the bitterest moments one is called upon to endure, – to feel an intensity of helpless pity, to chafe against a surging feeling of impotence, to watch, to wait and yet to do nothing, nothing of any telling value. One welcomes any little need of the patient’s. One poor boy one night whispered, ‘I don’t know what I want. I seem to be slipping away,’ and at his request there were changed and changed again the pillows, the cushions, the position of the limb, the cradle, the bedclothes, his lips were moistened, his face wiped and then he spoke again.
    ‘I know now why you nurses are called “sisters.” You
are
sisters to us boys.’ With a lump in the throat, and stinging tears at the back of the eyes one could only silently hope to be ever worthy of the name.

Chapter VI
Active Service in the Snow
    SNOW HAS FALLEN persistently for a fortnight. Its coming was presaged by leaden skies and dull grey shadow clouds, which delighted the Australian and New Zealand nurses who were unaccustomed to half-lights, and some of whom had never seen snow. Then one morning we awoke to find the camp mantled in whiteness, the tents roofed and the tent ropes powdered with fairy-poised flakes, while a flaming, early sun shot red shafts of light through a silhouetted fringe of tall poplars, whose high branches dangled clumps of mistletoe like so many deserted rooks’ nests.
    The New Zealanders especially were charmed, but,
nous autres
, we all shivered into our warmest woollies, packed them tight on us like the leaves of a head of lettuce. ‘Positively I shall have to peel myselftonight,’ vowed one girl. And, indeed, it takes a good many woollen garments to replace the furs and fur coats to which we have accustomed ourselves within the past few years. Finally, one gets into one’s clothes, laces up one’s service boots – how long they are! – with clumsy chilblained fingers, or thrusts and stamps one’s feet into gumboots, having first donned two pairs of stockings, one pair of woolly ‘slip-ons,’ or a pair of fleecy soles, and probably padded cotton, or cyanide, wool round the toes. Then with a jersey, a mackintosh, and a sou’wester over one’s uniform, out into the snow to the messroom, with no path yet made. It is one of the few times one pauses to remember that one is ‘on active service.’
    Of course, almost every one has a cold, almost every one has a cough, and every one has chilblains. Some unfortunate creatures have all three. Our chilblains, true to their inconvenient and inconsiderate kind, have cracked, and the disinfectants among which we dabble in the wards, while keeping them aseptic, give them never a chance to heal.
    So each day, like Henry V’s veterans, we count our wounds and scars and say – well, we say many things.
    Cures? We dutifully rub on, and in, liniments while lacking faith in their efficacy. One brave soul the othernight, driven to drastic measure by continuous irritation, walked boldly out into the snow in her bare feet. Some