Women to the Front by Heather Sheard

Author:Heather Sheard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143794714
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Part 5

1918

Chapter 6

‘The very uselessness and waste of it all’

These wounds do make one feel ill from the very uselessness and waste of it all besides the agony and the suffering. 1

Dr Vera Scantlebury, London, 26 April 1918

As the final year of the Great War began, a new enemy appeared across the battlefields and hospitals of Europe and Britain. An influenza pandemic that began in the spring of 1918 and continued to spread worldwide into 1919 caused the deaths of more people than any other outbreak of infection in history.2 Influenza appeared first in France and although the first wave of the disease caused widespread illness in soldiers and civilians there were few deaths. However, a second wave came in autumn of 1918 and spread far more rapidly. The mortality rate amongst its victims was much higher than earlier.3

By 1918, the Australian women doctors were scattered across Britain and the battlefields of Europe. Four had completed their service and returned to Australia: Lilian Cooper to Brisbane, Laura Fowler Hope to Adelaide, Helen Sexton to Melbourne and Lucy Gullett to Sydney. Laura Forster lay in a grave in Zaleschiki, a little village in south-east Galicia.

On the Eastern Front, Mary De Garis worked on in her tent as CMO at the SWH field hospital, 140 kilometres north-west of Salonica. More than 100 kilometres to the south of Mary, Elsie Dalyell was bent over her microscope at her laboratory in the bleak hills behind Salonica.

In France, Phoebe Chapple was travelling between the WAAC camps at Abbeville, Étaples and Rouen; the last being where Sydney doctor Marjory Little had begun work in one of the hospital laboratories. Five hundred kilometres to the south, Isabel Ormiston was at work in the historic Limoges’ ceramic factory, temporarily converted to a military hospital.

Elizabeth Hamilton-Browne and Katie Ardill would soon arrive in Egypt where Agnes Bennett and Lucy Gullett had served two years before.

Agnes had returned to London after an eventful journey from Sydney via the Panama Canal. Eleanor Bourne was up in the north of England as Area Controller of the Northern Command of the WAAC at York, and Irene Eaton was in charge of the Eastern Command. In London, Grace Cordingley was beginning her third year at the Royal Free Hospital in Holborn, barely half a kilometre from the Endell Street Military Hospital where Vera Scantlebury was in the operating theatre daily. Emma Buckley was at work in her laboratory at the King George in central London, and all three were experiencing the rush that accompanied the German Spring Offensive. Their last months of war service were filled with work, anxiety, fear and hope.

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