The nurse’s-eye view of the war

“There has been fighting on the front for several weeks,” nursing Sister Elsie Dorothy Collis of Victoria wrote in her diary on Oct. 2 to 4, 1916, when she was in Salonika, Greece, the base for the Balkan branch of the First World War.

“Had 22 admissions the first night. Several badly wounded, poor souls they are so good and patient.  Last night we got two wounded Bulgars as well as our own, 80 altogether ... Had one poor man, badly wounded in the leg. Dying all night ... Our two worst cases went on a ship this a.m.”

These soldiers — some killed in mountain battles, some wounded and dragged down to hospital in malarial lowlands on mule-drawn travois stretchers — were the same soldiers that misinformed war-pundits called “slackers,” supposedly basking in the Mediterranean sunshine while others died in the mud of the trench war in France and Belgium.

Historian Maureen Duffus relays the harsh Balkan reality in battlefront nurses in WWI, subtitled The Canadian Army Medical Corps in England, France and Salonika, 1914-1919: A diary, memoir and photograph albums from two British Columbia Nursing Sisters.

In 2003, Duffus looked at the world through Old Langford: An Illustrated History 1850-1950. Now she opens a personal-story window into world-changing events. Nurse Collis and Duffus’s aunt, nursing Sister Mary Ethel Morrison of View Royal, are the central figures. Both joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in Victoria in 1915, after they and others had graduated from hospital nursing schools (Royal Jubilee, St. Joseph’s, Vancouver General) organized on principles Florence Nightingale pioneered in the Crimean War, 1853-56.

Nurse Morrison’s posthumous input to Duffus’s book includes a memoir in a 1938 issue of The Canadian Nurse, written during the 20-year period which future historians may identify as an intermission between two parts of one war, 1914-1945. 

Duffus, building a framework for the nurses’ memories, dispels the “Salonika slackers” delusion, and explains the “Gardeners of Salonika” episode, in which some soldiers  wielded ploughs on abandoned farms and grew food for themselves and civilians while they waited in reserve to join comrades who confronted the Germans and Bulgars. 

After Bulgaria’s surrender in 1918, “Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s message to the German chancellor ... was clear: ‘In consequence of the collapse of the Macedonian front, there is no longer any possibility of winning the war.’” 

Beyond the author’s self-imposed limits — she was telling the story of two Victoria nurses, not analyzing the entire war — other historians’ research suggests that the Balkan outcome trashed the hope of a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, stopped a flow of food grain and drastically reduced oil supplies for U-boats, airplanes and army trucks.

The Balkan advance together with Allied victories further east triggered a domino sequence of surrenders by Bulgaria, Austro-Hungary and Turkey and left Germany standing alone. It cut the heart out of Germany’s war effort and terminated the drive of the Kaiser’s empire to dominate the world.

That costly achievement was one chapter in a continuing quarrel among rival power-wielders about who would grab the lion’s share of the wealth and privilege generated by industrial-age machines and weapons. The contest arguably transcended partisan attempts to assign blame. Sanctified on each side by sometimes opposed, sometimes shared religious and secular beliefs, it caused wild currency inflation, destroyed the German middle class by rendering their money worthless, and invited the rise of Hitler.

The smiling face of Victoria Nursing Sister Gladys “Bobby” Wake, wounded in an air attack on a hospital in Etaples, France, and pictured in Duffus’s book, outshines the geopolitical blunders.         

“May 21: Saw ‘Bob’… Has most terrible wounds, gangrene. I’m sure by the odour ...”

“May 22: ‘Bob’ buried this morning. It was dreadfully trying. 46 of the boys were all buried together in one long grave.”

gemort@pacificcoast.net

—G.E. Mortimore is a Langford-based writer. Think About It appears every second week in the Gazette.

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