Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War Read Online Free Page A

government expressly requested that no young women be sent, the minimum age was set at twenty-eight, later raised to thirty.
    F.F.N.C. nurses typically worked in small groups of six or fewer, joining the staff of existing mobile hospitals near the firing line and stationary hospitals in the French interior. As nurses they accepted officers’ rank inthe French Army and until March 1917 the French government paid them a small salary and outfit allowance — so small as to make them nominal “volunteers.” Travel and other expenses were to be paid out-of-pocket, and deficiencies in hospital supplies — such as gloves, thermometers, soap, and hot water bottles — were to be solicited from folks back home. Beginning in 1917, the British Branch ( Comité de Londres ) of the French Red Cross assumed financing and oversight responsibilities.
    Evidently there were interpersonal obstacles to overcome in this arrangement. According to a contemporary (unabashedly pro-British) account, “Differences of custom and of religion . . . provide subtle opportunities for bruised feeling . . . But what may well cause wonder is that, with so many occasions of difficulty, things came to run so smoothly as on the whole they have done. The Sisters won their way to confidence by the excellence of their work.” One can well imagine the tensions this situation suggested for nurses in the wards, and the journal The Canadian Nurse acknowledged that the linguistic, cultural, and practical challenges were “difficult for us, of course, but even more so for [the French]. Both contracting parties, however, have bravely stood the test, and have broken down all the barriers which might have proved insuperable.”
    Cool, brave heads were critical in the milieus of F.F.N.C. service. While some of its hospitals were permanent structures located well behind the front, many others took the form of ambulances volants , or “mobile ambulances.” Not to be confused with motor ambulances, which were transport vehicles, these were rough barracks and tents erected close to the front, ready to be hastily dismantled and re-established as the army advanced or retreated. When the wind wasn’t blowing the canvas down around their heads, nurses caught precious sleep in tiny bell tents while aircraft growled overhead and not-so-distant guns convulsed the ground. Night-duty nurses slept in broad daylight as convoys rumbled through and soldiers drilled just outside their tent flaps. “For a woman to be part of an ambulance like this is quite a new order of things,” Grace Ellison wrote to her readership, for the F.F.N.C. promised acute danger and long hours at a time when the Canadian army had not yet introduced nursing sisters into its casualty clearing stations near the firing line. Recruitmentappeals were fairly blunt about conditions: only women animated by a “pioneer spirit” need apply for this situation of discomfort and danger, surrounded by ruins and mud and sometimes lacking in basics such as four walls and someone to look after laundry. But, Ellison’s letters urged, the satisfaction of lending desperately needed help to grateful poilus , the affectionate term in general use for the mustachioed and bearded French soldiers, was reward enough for the “true nurse.” Indeed, F.F.N.C. nurses could boast of being in the vanguard — for example, they were among the first to occupy the devastated districts across the Hindenburg Line in 1918 — and many took home prestigious French military honours such as the Croix de Guerre and Médaille des Épidémies , awarded for persistent bravery under bombardment.
    The scope of the F.F.N.C. sisters’ mission differed in another major way from that of their Canadian military sisters: F.F.N.C. hospitals were less exclusively military and more available to the civil population. Whether or not the founders originally intended it that way, the