Field Hospital and Flying Column: Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia — John Shaqi
Field Hospital and Flying Column: Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & RussiaThurstan, Violetta
History
Field Hospital and Flying Column: Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia
Thurstan, Violetta
World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals, charities, etc.; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Just then a letter arrived marked "Urgent," and in it was an order that
I should be at the station at 12 P. M. the next day _without
fail_, accompanied by my nurses. I was very sad that they had discovered
I did not want to go, because I knew now that they would leave no stone
unturned to make me, but I determined to resist to the last moment and
not go if I could help it. So I sent back a message to the Head Doctor
of the Red Cross unit, asking him to convey to the German authorities
the fact that I was ill in bed and could not travel the next day. Back
came a message to say that they regretted to hear I was ill, and that I
should be transferred at once to a German hospital and be attended by a
German doctor. That, of course, was no good at all--I should then
probably have been a German prisoner till the end of the war, and not
have been the slightest use to anyone.
I very reluctantly gave in and said I would go. We were told that we
should be safely conducted as far as the Dutch frontier, and so I
determined to get across to Antwerp if I could from there and work my
way back to Brussels in private clothes.
I scrambled up somehow the next day, and found a very large party
assembled outside the Gare du Nord, as every single English nurse and
doctor in Brussels was to be expelled. There must have been fifteen or
twenty doctors and dressers altogether, and more than a hundred Sisters
and nurses.
A squad of German soldiers were lined up outside the station, and two
officers guarded the entrance. They had a list of our names, and as each
name was read out, we were passed into the station, where a long, black
troop-train composed of third-class carriages was waiting for us. The
front wagons were, I believe, full of either wounded or prisoners, as
only a few carriages were reserved for us. However, we crowded in, eight
of us in a carriage meant for six, and found, greatly to our surprise,
that there were two soldiers with loaded rifles sitting at the window in
each compartment. There was nothing to be said, we were entirely in
their hands, and after all the Dutch frontier was not so very far off.
The soldiers had had orders to sit at the two windows and prevent us
seeing out, but our two guards were exceedingly nice men, not Prussians
but Danish Germans from Schleswig-Holstein, who did not at all enjoy the
job they had been put to, so our windows were not shut nor our blinds
down as those in some of the other carriages were.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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