The 1916 Battle of the Somme Reconsidered by Peter Liddle

Author:Peter Liddle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War I
ISBN: 9781473881747
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

There is little question that what kept Sister Slythe’s spirits up was her intense desire to increase her own experience of life, which in her current circumstance meant seeing all that she could see of military activity and a good deal that she ought not to have seen. She raided dumps of shell cases for souvenirs and she relished a lift from General Birdwood as she was making her way along a road to the Field Cashier at Senlis. The General was ‘only sorry he could not wait to take me back but he was due at Pozières to give decorations. I told him to be careful. I don’t think Pozières is a nice place to give decorations in.’ Returning from Albert on one occasion, she saw a demonstration of poison gas and a bomb-throwing school at work. ‘Altogether a well spent morning.’ Hearing an unusual rumble of traffic noise outside the Hospice, she saw seven caterpillar tractors ‘five with gun mountings. You never heard anything like the noise. I had to go down to the gate to watch them.’

An especially heavy bombardment was ‘one of the finest noises I’ve heard’. Early in September, Major Bean, their Australian anaesthetist, ‘brought in his brother Charles, a war correspondent, to see me tonight … He says that we have really done very well. We have the whole of Guillemont and Ginchy now’ and soon after this there was talk of their hospital staff being ‘filmed as Canadian nurses on the battlefield’. A Colonel Templeton was ‘going to get a gun or two and rig up a film for Canada! We are to be in overalls as our uniform isn’t quite the brass bound bright blue thing that Miss Canada wears. But I would have thought wide awake America would have known you don’t find Sisters and guns falling over each other – even Canadian Sisters.’

The most thrilling experience she wangled during September was the successful organisation of an ambulance journey which took her towards La Boisselle. Over a ridge ‘was a sight I couldn’t have imagined. White lines showed the earth thrown up from trenches. A collection of short irregularly spiked bits of wood sticking up 1–5 ft out of the apparently ploughed earth and a few bits of brick was the village of Ovillers.’ Similarly she described La Boisselle, Contalmaison and Pozières and while she watched, she was rewarded with the huge fountain of earth which was ‘My first shell-burst!’23 If everything about this scene were to have been extraordinary, the diary confirms that Alice Slythe, qualified and professional as she was, captured to a remarkable degree the adventurous spirit which animated so many women in the different branches of nursing and related work in France in the second half of 1916.

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