(1) Helen Fairchild, letter to her mother from her Casualty Clearing Station at Ypres (August 1917)

I am with an operating team about 100 miles from our own Base Hospital, closer to the fighting lines. I'll sure have a lot to tell about this experience when I get home. I have been here three weeks and see no signs of going back yet, although when we came we only expected to be here a few days. Of course, I didn't bring much with me. Had two white dresses and two aprons, and two combinations. Now can you imagine trying to keep decent with that much clothing in a place where it rains nearly every day.

We all live in tents and wade through mud to and from the operating room where we stand in mud higher than our ankles. It was some task, but dear old Major Harte, who I am up here with, got a car and a man; to go down to our hospital and get us some things. He brought me six clean uniforms and aprons, beside heaps of notes from all the nurses, letters from home and all kinds of fruit and cake.

We made the trip up to this place in an auto-ambulance 100 miles through France. Oh I shall have books to tell when I get home.

 

(2) Ida Downs worked at a Casualty Clearing Station at Passchendaele (1920)

The casualty clearing stations were frequently the scene of the most distressing sight which human eye can witness, that is the re-wounding and killing of already wounded men by an enemy's bomb dropped suddenly in the dead of night. There was hardly a moonlight night that the Hun did not visit our neighborhood and drop bombs. We dug below the level of the ground to form shallow graves, two by six, by eighteen inches deep, which were dug through the floor of our tents, and when the anti-aircraft guns were shooting and particles of the exploded shells were falling, we partly closed over a section of the floor of the tent which was hinged and which
had a piece of sheet iron nailed on the underside.

I was impressed with the bravery and fortitude of the women nurses. Night bombing is a terrifying thing, and those who are not disturbed by it possess unusual qualities. I believe the nurses showed less fear than anyone. In 1920 I had the opportunity to visit this casualty clearing station area again, where I found only a few of the metal huts standing, but was able to locate the nurses dug-out, and the holes in the ground where they slept.

 

(3) Clare Tisdall worked as a nurse at a Casualty Clearing Station at the Somme.

During the Somme we practically never stopped. I was up for seventeen nights before I had a night in bed. A lot of the boys had legs blown off, or hastily amputated at the front-line. These boys were the ones who were in the greatest pain, and I very often used to have to hold the stump up in the ambulance for the whole journey, so that it wouldn't bump on the stretcher.

The worse case I saw - and it still haunts me - was of a man being carried past us. It was at night, and in the dim light I thought that his face was covered with a black cloth. But as he came nearer, I was horrified to realize that the whole lower half of his face had been completely blown off and what had appeared to be a black cloth was a huge gaping hole. It was the only time I nearly fainted.

 

Clare Tisdall with her younger brother, Lieutenant Charles Tisdall,
while he was convalescing from wounds. Tisdall recovered but
was killed by a sniper four days before his nineteenth birthday.

 

 

(4) Drusilla Bowcott found nursing the wounded soldiers very difficult at first.

"Hold that stump", said the Sister, and the poor chap must have felt dreadful because I grabbed his leg well above the knee, and as the solution of Eusol and Peroxide was poured on to the stump, the pus was pouring over my hands. Then I saw two stumps, two Sisters, and I must have started to sway because I was carted away and someone said: "Put your head between your knees and you'll be all right."

It's amazing what you get hardened to. But the pain the men suffered was frightful and we had nothing to give them. Aspirin was not much good but there was nothing, no pain killer, between that and a morphine injection at the other end of the scale, which they got if they were very bad. But that made them unconscious, so it was only given in very extreme cases.

 

Drusilla Bowcott with her brother. He was
killed a month after this picture was taken.