First Aid Nursing Yeomanry; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The Hospital we had given us was for Belgian Tommies, and called
Lamarck, and had been a Convent school before the War. There were fifty
beds for "_blesses_" and fifty for typhoid patients, which at that
period no other Hospital in the place would take. It was an extremely
virulent type of pneumonic typhoid. These cases were in a building apart
from the main Hospital and across the yard. Dominating both buildings
was the cathedral of Notre Dame, with its beautiful East window facing
our yard.
The top floor of the main building was a priceless room and reserved for
us. Curtained off at the far end were the beds of the chauffeurs who had
to sleep on the premises while the rest were billeted in the town; the
other end resolved itself into a big untidy, but oh so jolly, sitting
room. Packing cases were made into seats and piles of extra blankets
were covered and made into "tumpties," while round the stove stood the
interminable clothes horses airing the shirts and sheets, etc., which
Lieutenant Franklin brooded over with a watchful eye! It was in this
room we all congregated at ten o'clock every morning for twenty precious
minutes during which we had tea and biscuits, read our letters, swanked
to other wards about the bad cases we had got in, and generally talked
shop and gossiped. There was an advanced dressing station at Oostkerke
where three of the girls worked in turn, and we also took turns to go up
to the trenches on the Yser at night, with fresh clothes for the men and
bandages and dressings for those who had been wounded.
At one time we were billeted in a fresh house every three nights which,
as the reader may imagine in those "moving" times, had its
disadvantages. After a time, as a great favour, an empty shop was
allowed us as a permanency. It rejoiced in the name of "Le Bon Genie"
and was at the corner of a street, the shop window extending along the
two sides. It was this "shop window" we used as a dormitory, after
pasting the lower panes with brown paper. When they first heard at home
that we "slept in a shop window" they were mildly startled. We were so
short of beds that the night nurses tumbled into ours as soon as they
were vacated in the morning, so there was never much fear of suffering
from a damp one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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