First Aid Nursing Yeomanry; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
it proved to be! The woman was yelling and groaning, "_Mon Dieu, je suis
tuee_," but according to the "red hat" she was as "right as rain,
nothing but 'ysteria." I blessed that M.P. and hoped we would meet
again. We helped her on to the front seat, where Thompson supported her,
while I drove to hospital to see if any damage had been done. Singularly
enough, she was only suffering from bruises and a torn skirt, and of
course the loss of her "false 'air" (which I had refused to touch, it
had given me such a turn). I can only hope her husband, who was with her
at the time, picked it up. He followed to hospital and gave her a most
frightful scolding, adding that of course the "Mees" could not do
otherwise than knock her down if she so foolishly sprang in front of
cars without warning; and she might think herself lucky that the "Mees"
would not run her in for being in the way! It has always struck me as
being so humorous that in England if you knock a pedestrian over they
can have you up, while in France the law is just the reverse. She sobbed
violently, and I had to tell him that what she wanted was sympathy and
not scolding.
It took me a day or two to get over that scalping expedition (of course
the story was all round the camp within the hour!) and for some time
after I slowed down crossing the bridge. This was the one and only time
anything of the sort ever happened to me, thank goodness!
Our camp began to look very smart, and the seeds we had sown in the
spring came up and covered the huts with creepers. We had as many
flowers inside our huts as we could possibly get into the shell cases
and other souvenirs which perforce were turned into flower vases--a
change they must have thought rather singular. The steady boom of the
guns used to annoy me intensely, for it shook the petals off the roses
long before they would otherwise have fallen, and I used to call out,
crossly, "_Do_ stop that row, you're simply ruining my flowers." But
that made no difference to the distant gunners, who carried on night and
day causing considerably more damage than the falling petals from my
roses!
We began to classify the new girls as they came out, jokingly calling
them "Kitchener's" Army, "Derby's Scheme," and finally, "Conscripts."
The old "regulars" of course put on most fearful side. It was amusing
when an air-raid warning (a siren known as "mournful Mary") went at Mess
and the shrapnel began to fly, to see the new girls all rush out to
watch the little white balls bursting in the sky, and the old hands not
turning a hair but going on steadily with the bully beef or Maconochie,
whichever it happened to be. Then one by one the new ones would slink
back rather ashamed of their enthusiasm and take their seats, and in
time they in turn would smile indulgently as the still newer ones dashed
out to watch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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