The Anzac Girls: The Extraordinary Story of Our World War I Nurses by Peter Rees

Author:Peter Rees [Rees, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military, World War I, history, book, ebook
ISBN: 9781743437438
Google: fWw8AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed lay a young British soldier or part of a young British soldier. There was not much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to the thigh and both his arms to the shoulder-blades . . . another case of the same kind; one leg gone and the other going, and one arm . . . I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with bright eyes. His right leg was uncovered, and supported on a board hung from the ceiling. Its flesh was like that of a chicken badly carved—white, flabby, and in tatters. In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been lopped of limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them unconscious, some of them strangely and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes as though staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged nearer.22

Trains were commandeered and the wounded were brought in by any means possible. One of the sisters doing train duty was Annie Shadforth, who had ‘heard the great barrage’ that announced the opening of the battle. Annie had a busy time collecting patients from various casualty clearing stations and unloading them at the different base hospitals, on each trip carrying between 500 and 600 patients. This went on for a fortnight. At the Gazencourt clearing station, she found the grounds, as well as the tents, packed ‘and ambulance cars and a small train almost like a toy train bringing in more’.

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