A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front by Olive Dent

Author:Olive Dent
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753550755
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter XVIII

Active Service in the Rain

THE MORNING DAWNED bright and warm, so warm that the up-patients took out their chairs and sat on the grass which does duty as lawn, while the tent walls were rolled back for the benefit and pleasure of the bed patients.

The sun was so ingratiating that it wooed one or two boys into doing ‘a bit o’ weeding’ in our ‘garden,’ and into transplanting some horticultural specimens, so anaemic and so badly suffering from debility that their genus could not be determined. ‘And good transplanting weather, too,’ prophesied the rheumatic patients. ‘We shall have rain before the day is out.’

About noon the rain comes, sending us all on duty after lunch, fully armed against its torrential attentions – two pairs of stockings, gum boots, shortest dress, belted mackintosh, together with sou’wester in place of, or over, our cap, since diving in and out of dripping tents soon gives one’s stiffest, starchiest cap the appearance of a time-worn dish rag, added to which is the obvious danger of achieving a portentous cold.

One goes on the rounds with a medicine basket filled with half-a-dozen bottles, a couple of medicine glasses, towel, and small rinsing bowl. No sooner does one leave the tent than a particularly spiteful gust of wind comes, raises one’s mackintosh like a balloon, and flaps the towel – which has hitherto been folded, but is now rebellious – with stinging lashes on one’s hand, the rain pinging on one’s face with seemingly delightful venom.

One struggles along and nearly tumbles into each tent, the wind is so typically March. Then another round is made with mouthwashes, gargles, and inhalations, the while one gets nicely soaked dipping under the tent eaves, and has rivulets running off one’s sou’wester and down one’s back. Next follows the round for straightening, and possibly remaking beds, with the consequent stripping of the mackintosh and, perhaps, sou’wester in each tent. Meantime the rain has gained in vigour and persistence, so much so, that it finds out the faulty parts in the tent roof and walls.

The orderly is called, and together we go round seeing to the closing of those ventilators which are allowing the rain to enter, placing bowls to catch innocuous drippings, pulling forward beds out of harm’s – and the rain’s – way.

Teatime comes, and so does the ward sergeant with ‘warnings’ for the England cases – ‘a quarter-of-an-hour, sister.’ One hurries from tent to tent, completes the filling-in of Blighty tickets, sees that the quite naturally excited travellers have had a plentiful tea, and that their kit is quite correct, hurries to the duty tent for a better scarf than the one with which a departing hero is contenting his happy self, bids goodbye all round, and splashes back to a tent, where an orderly has just reported four new admissions.

Temperatures are taken, blanket baths set in progress. Then one wades back to the nursing quarters through a paddock pied with rain-spattered daisies, dripping cowslips, and celandine. A gust of wind and rain considerably assist one’s entry into the hut containing our bunks.

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