Saving Lives on the Front Line

by Guest Sun Nov 12, 2017 11:29 am

The work of military nurses at Passchendaele transformed the perception of women’s war service, showing they could perform life-saving work and risk their lives at the front.

In the summer of 1917, hundreds of military nurses were moved from base hospitals on the north coast of France to casualty clearing stations (CCSs) and field hospitals in Flanders. Travelling through French and Belgian farmlands, many noted in their diaries how beautiful the fields were in June and early July, full of flowering poppies, marguerites and cornflowers. Yet the further east they journeyed, the more powerfully the First World War – the war they believed would end all wars – forced itself upon their consciousness. The roads were choked with tens of thousands of soldiers making their way to the front, jockeying for space with horse-drawn artillery limbers and wagons filled with ammunition. While still many miles from the front, they could hear the distant thunder of the bombardment – part of the escalation of warfare in the days leading up to the Third Battle of Ypres. On arriving at Brandhoek, where the CCSs were only three miles from the reserve trenches, Australian nurse May Tilton noted in her diary that:

The flashes from the guns and the marvellous illuminations in the sky [were] more dazzling than any lightning.

A continuous rumble and roar, as of an immense factory of vibrating machinery, filled the night. The pulsings and vibration worked into our bodies and brains; the screech of big shells, and the awful crash when they burst at no great distance, kept our nerves on edge; but even to this terrific noise we became accustomed.

Most CCSs were clustered in a small area just west of the ruined Belgian city of Ypres, close to a devastated terrain over which two lengthy – and inconclusive – campaigns had already been fought. In October 1914, the First Battle of Ypres had fixed the shape of the Ypres Salient, a bulge of land pushing eastwards from the city itself. For the next three years, the German army had dominated the high ground to the north, east and south of Ypres and its officers had been able to observe the movement of Allied troops and armaments. In April 1915, in the Second Battle of Ypres, poison gas had been used for the first time during a German attempt to break through the Allied lines. Approximately 1,000 French and North African troops were killed instantly. Many thousands more had been brought, coughing, choking and temporarily blinded, to casualty clearing stations and field hospitals to the west of Ypres. Now, two years later, in the summer of 1917, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was planning ‘Third Ypres’, the ‘breakthrough’ that would win – and end – the war.

Until the First World War, women who ‘followed’ armies and cared for their wounded had been viewed with suspicion. Even the creation in 1902 of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) during the Second Anglo-Boer War had permitted female nurses only a minor presence in the bastion of patriarchal authority that was known, from 1898 onwards, as the Royal Army Medical Corps. But the position of women was already changing as the campaign to secure women’s right to vote progressed. In 1908 a Territorial Force Nursing Service had created a register of approximately 3,000 female nurses willing to enrol in military hospital service on the home front in time of war. The QAIMNS had a reserve of about 800 members, ready to serve overseas should war be declared. A year later, units known as ‘Voluntary Aid Detachments’ were formed and these recruited more than 70,000 volunteer nurses.

https://www.historytoday.com/christine-e-hallett/saving-lives-front-line

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