MEMOIR
The
Silent Ward By Alfreda Jenness Attrill
The author was a nurse in the First World War. She lived in Winnipeg and graduated from the Winnipeg General Hospital in 1909. She went overseas with the first contingent of the Canadian Army Medical Corps and served the entire war in France, Salonika and England. Her first posting was at the #2 Stationary Hospital, which was established in the Golf Hotel at Le Touquet, France, in 1914. This was written in March 1915. This letter is provided by her great niece, Sandra Moulton.
NURSING SISTER Alfreda Attrill in her Canadian Army Medical Corps uniform, 1916.
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N A WAR HOSPITAL. It may be of interest to you all if I try, however inadequately, to describe three days of our recent work here, as the best means of impressing a picture of the conditions on your minds. This is by no means ‘the front’ and compared to those of the English sisters and the Red Cross volunteers, our experiences have been tame, but nevertheless, last week echoes of the fierce fighting around Le Basse and the dearly bought success of Neuve Chapelle has connected us with the battle at the front very quickly, and human wreckage has been cast up to our doors. I am doing night duty at present. On March 8th, quite a number of new patients had been admitted. There is also a message (March 9th) from Boulogne, that a trainload of about 150 are being sent to us, of which 84 are bad stretcher cases. The night nurses hurry from room to room making themselves acquainted with patients they
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have not seen, doing PRN [pro re nata—as needed] dressings and carrying out whatever orders can be done ahead so as to be free later. The day staff dons rubber aprons and come on duty to assist in receiving the patients, ambulance beds ready, sheets on radiators, record books prepared, etc. It is close upon midnight when the 10 or 12 ambulances make their first journey from the Etaples Train Station three miles away through the woods, and the unloading and passing before the admitting officer begins. It is a ghostly procession to which we have become accustomed. Quietly, they file along the corridors—these broken men from the trenches whose deeds when they are properly known will make the world dumb with respect, whose accumulated miseries none can realize. Khaki caked with clay, ragged, dirty, worn out and silent, they stumble into the warmth of the wards. In the droop of the body, the dull retrospective eyes and restrained speech, one catches glimpses of the weeks of horror that followed Mons, the countless nights of slow agony.
Health Sciences Centre Winnipeg/999.18.8
2017-01-26 4:33 PM
