Trip from Trinidad - 8 More on Mairi and the War

I have decided to tell you the rest of the story about Mairi in the war, because I find it so exciting to write about. Much has been written about it, including books by both Mairi and Elsie, and many newspaper articles have talked about their war work. How I managed to be so ignorant of it, I don’t know, but I am making up for it now. I am as pleased to hear about Mairi as Margaret is to talk about her.

“Mairi told us,” said Margaret, “Of course, the Belgians had not expected a war, and their medical arrangements were mixed. Their men were in a terrible state, they hadn't got hospital equipments or anything. And so it was really a rescue affair and a great emergency. When they arrived in Belgium," she said, "the Germans were threatening to overwhelm the country. At this early stage in the war, before both sides had become bogged down in the stalemate of trench warfare, the front lines were still in a state of flux, and on one occasion they wandered down a road and found themselves in the German lines. On two other occasions, they were caught up in bayonet charges. The result of a bayonet charge was very disagreeable, very - very nasty. And then at the battle of Dixmude. just north of Ypres they were in another bayonet charge, just hiding alongside it. I think that is quite one of the most disagreeable forms of wounding.”

“How could you bear to know about all those things?” I asked Margaret.

“Most of it I didn’t know until it was all over. She has written so many articles and we have been asked about it so often in the past, that it sort of takes the horror away from it.”

“Am I upsetting you by having you tell me all this again?” I asked her.

“No, not at all. It has been 10 years now, and we are going back to see Mairi. Of course these things are all in my mind again, and talking about them makes it easier for me to remember what really happened, and what some people have assumed happened.

"While the ambulance service director, Hector Munro, was fund-raising in England Gilbert was back in the picture. Elsie and Mairi had been strolling round Dunkerque when they spotted him in the crowd: there was no mistaking his gait and gay insouciance. They flew towards him with outstretched hands. He was dusty and weary from his adventures but unhurt. Mairi told me about him flirting with them, “You won’t have the pleasure of nursing me. I believe you’re disappointed,” he chaffed in his quick French, but she quickly spotted ‘the tender, quizzical look he gave her friend and Mairi tactfully left them alone. She started to wonder if Elsie would marry Gilbert. Mairi was impressed by Elsie, almost star-struck by the older woman, believing she was so good-looking, so high-spirited, so charming, that many, many men would want to marry her; and she did love to be loved."

Margaret, of course, thought that Mairi was every bit as pretty as Elsie, and showed me pictures of them both, and I had to agree with her.

“Gilbert returned feeling despondent and Mairi helped Elsie prepare his bath. She said that while she was doing it, she was thinking about how appalled we would have been at this kind of behaviour. I expect it was the first time Mairi had drawn a bath and certainly the first time she had done such a thing for a strange man. Everyone’s lives and manners were in a state of flux.

"The Corps would spend hours in the Gleasons' room talking about politics and the war and this was a fascinating time for Mairi. She was mixing with people older than herself from different places and backgrounds. Arthur Gleason, the newspaper correspondent, had just returned from spending five weeks in the trenches and the relief of him being safe would have added to the holiday atmosphere. To Elsie’s delight Gilbert was asked to join the Corps and for her things were going swimmingly. Most nights there were romantic walks along the beach with the revolving searchlights sweeping it all the time and all lights out all along, no café lights. She would take his breakfast to him and get his motorbike ready. But Mairi, who had palled up with Sarah Macnaughtan, a new member of the Corps, had enough of the holiday mood and was itching to get to their next destination: Furnes.

"On the 21st of October Munro's Corps drove in convoy to Furnes where the main hospital, hurriedly converted from a boys’ college, was in a terrible muddle and struggling to cope. Many of the town’s six thousand inhabitants had fled in advance of the German push, and Dixmude, Pervyse and Nieuport were being pounded in an attempt to break the line that the British, French and Belgians were struggling to hold. Towns and villages, houses and woods blazed for days on end and quickly Furnes was overwhelmed with hundreds of casualties, many of them serious.

"Those for whom there was no room at the hospital, and were likely to survive the journey, would be taken to the railway station and sent off to military hospitals in Calais or England. There was not enough of anything and the wounded continued to pour in; when the beds ran out men were laid out on stretchers on the floor or were propped against the wall. There were so many men dying and not enough male orderlies to remove the bodies from the wards, especially those who had died in the night, that as soon as Elsie and Mairi got there they were told to remove all the bodies they could find to the mortuary and the convent, which Elsie called a horrid job.

"Mairi witnessed her first death on her first day at Furnes, a young man with a serious head injury. It became obvious that he did not have long to live and she sat with him until he died. Then the nurses laid him out and Mairi and Elsie carried his body on a stretcher to the convent. They also helped out in the operating theatre, carrying away amputated limbs and returning the men to the wards. The days at Furnes were shocking and bewildering for Mairi. She said no one can understand unless one has seen the rows of dead men laid out on stretchers, the majority wrapped in  winding sheets but here and there one is uncovered who has been left as he died.

"The wards were hellish places: where they saw the most hideous sights imaginable, men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated and when they went into the room they were horrified at the suffering which was ghastly.

"Elsie realised that many of the men dying while they were being transported back from the front in ambulances who could be saved if they were treated immediately after being wounded. So she and Mairi set off for the front and established an advanced dressing station in the ruined village of Pervyse, right on the front line of the Belgian trenches in the cellar of a house. They had been working with Dr Munro's Ambulance Corps for just two months, but felt that they stood a greater chance of saving wounded soldiers if they could be treated at the actual front. He didn’t agree to let them go, so they left the Corps and went out on their own.

"By this time, the front line had become more fixed. Elsie said, “We filled our knapsacks and things with such as we required and walked up with the soldiers. We must have marched about ten kilometres up into the trenches in the pitch dark.”

"The Belgians did not expect the girls to last out for more than 24 hours in the front-line trenches. In the end, they were there for nearly four years. They were unique in being the only women to be given full access to the front line.

"Mairi and Elsie soon became familiar with the horrific injuries sustained by the soldiers. With no antibiotics and little proper medical equipment they had to deal with the aftermath of enemy attacks. Instant decisions had to be taken about who could be saved. (pictured above)

"If people were hit by shrapnel, the chances were that they got gas gangrene and went out on superficial wounds.The only thing they really had was iodine in those days which Mairi said they poured into everything.

"They had to make hard decisions. There was one boy, very, very badly hit on the head and the brain was emerging. The brain was damaged to the extent that it would never be right, and there were masses of wounded soldiers coming in and they were most important because a lot of them were savable. And do you know what they did? They opened everything up and let the brain drop into a bucket. But they both had nightmares about it afterwards."

“How awful!” I said.

"In a sense, the soldiers treated the girls as if they were living saints. They were dealing with a Catholic country and Mairi says they called them deux madones de Pervyse. She said they had, funnily enough, over the entrance to the dug-out. a little shrine thing, you see, and that's what the soldiers called us, the two madonnas of Pervyse, and they felt if they fell into our hands, you see, they had every possible chance."

As that is the end of the story for 1915, I will end here and say good night.

Love

Grandma Louise