Fanny Goes to War | Page 5

bearers were feeling too exhausted to
appreciate this piece of acting, and heather is extremely slippery stuff.
When we had struggled back with her the soi-disant doctor asked for
the diagnosis. "Drunk and disorderly," replied one of them, stepping
smartly forward and saluting! This somewhat broke up the proceedings,
and _lèse majesté_ was excused on the grounds that it was too dark to
recognise it was the C.O. The tent pegs were pulled up and the tent
pulled down and we all thankfully tramped back to camp to sleep the
sleep of the just till the reveille sounded to herald another day.
CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The last Chapter was devoted to the F.A.N.Y.'s in camp before the War,
but from now onwards will be chronicled facts that befell them on
active service.
When war broke out in August 1914 Lieutenant Ashley Smith lost no
time in offering the Corps' services to the War Office. To our intense
disappointment these were refused. However, F.A.N.Y.'s are not easily
daunted. The Belgian Army, at that time, had no organised medical

corps in the field, and informed us they would be extremely grateful if
we would take over a Hospital for them. Lieutenant Smith left for
Antwerp in September 1914, and had arranged to take a house there for
a Hospital when the town fell; her flight to Ghent where she stayed to
the last with a dying English officer, until the Germans arrived, and her
subsequent escape to Holland have been told elsewhere. (_A F.A.N.Y.
in France--Nursing Adventures._) Suffice it to say we were delighted to
see her safely back among us again in October; and on the last day of
that month the first contingent of F.A.N.Y.'s left for active service,
hardly any of them over twenty-one.
I was unfortunately not able to join them until January 1915; and never
did time drag so slowly as in those intervening months. I spent the time
in attending lectures and hospital, driving a car and generally picking
up every bit of useful information I could. The day arrived at last and
Coley and I were, with the exception of the Queen of the Belgians
(travelling incognito) and her lady-in-waiting, the only women on
board.
The Hospital we had given us was for Belgian Tommies, and called
Lamarck, and had been a Convent school before the War. There were
fifty beds for "_blessés_" and fifty for typhoid patients, which at that
period no other Hospital in the place would take. It was an extremely
virulent type of pneumonic typhoid. These cases were in a building
apart from the main Hospital and across the yard. Dominating both
buildings was the cathedral of Notre Dame, with its beautiful East
window facing our yard.
The top floor of the main building was a priceless room and reserved
for us. Curtained off at the far end were the beds of the chauffeurs who
had to sleep on the premises while the rest were billeted in the town;
the other end resolved itself into a big untidy, but oh so jolly, sitting
room. Packing cases were made into seats and piles of extra blankets
were covered and made into "tumpties," while round the stove stood
the interminable clothes horses airing the shirts and sheets, etc., which
Lieutenant Franklin brooded over with a watchful eye! It was in this
room we all congregated at ten o'clock every morning for twenty

precious minutes during which we had tea and biscuits, read our letters,
swanked to other wards about the bad cases we had got in, and
generally talked shop and gossiped. There was an advanced dressing
station at Oostkerke where three of the girls worked in turn, and we
also took turns to go up to the trenches on the Yser at night, with fresh
clothes for the men and bandages and dressings for those who had been
wounded.
At one time we were billeted in a fresh house every three nights which,
as the reader may imagine in those "moving" times, had its
disadvantages. After a time, as a great favour, an empty shop was
allowed us as a permanency. It rejoiced in the name of "Le Bon Génie"
and was at the corner of a street, the shop window extending along the
two sides. It was this "shop window" we used as a dormitory, after
pasting the lower panes with brown paper. When they first heard at
home that we "slept in a shop window" they were mildly startled. We
were so short of beds that the night nurses tumbled into ours as soon as
they were vacated in the morning, so there was never much fear of
suffering from a damp one.
Our patients were soldiers of the Belgian line and cavalry regiments
and at first I was put in