Nurses at War -The True Story of Army Nursing Sisters' Courage in World War Two by Jean Bowden remembers the brave nursing sisters of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), known with admiration by their grateful patients as the ‘Q.A.s’.
These dedicated women faced danger and sometimes death to care for wounded servicemen during the Second World War. They worked tirelessly in the field – their lives constantly at risk, but throughout they showed courage, spirit and even humour. Among tales of fear and heartbreak, there
are also many moments of compassion and hope.
The inspiring nursing sisters worked in the most dangerous places of action during World War Two ‒ including Dunkirk, Malta, Hong Kong and El Alamein. They encountered death and disease on an unprecedented scale, suffered harsh imprisonment by the Japanese, and were bombed while on
board hospital ships and trains. But wherever they found themselves, the sisters continued to carry
out their duties with professionalism and a plucky determination.
First published to great success and acclaim in 1959 as Grey Touched with Scarlet, this book has been written based on the first-hand accounts of the army nursing sisters.
The publisher has kindly provided the following excerpt from the book:
The following
excerpt takes place on No. 4 Ambulance Train, at a village siding outside
Dieppe, just six days after the German invasion of the Low Countries.
By the time they were
loaded, the train was crammed. There were between six and eight hundred people
on board, many of whom were very ill. They had been brought, hurriedly and
haphazardly, in the intervals between raids.
It was all so heartbreakingly different from the
calm peacetime procedure of the hospitals which had seen Sister Breen, busy as
always among her charges. But she and her colleagues had few minutes to spare
for such comparisons. As soon as an engine could be found for their coaches,
they would be off; in the meantime, they must make their patients as
comfortable as they could.
They were standing, immobilized for the present by
their lack of an engine, alongside the quay. Two hospital ships, the Maid of
Kent and the Brighton, lay at anchor empty, a few yards away. Next
to these was an oil tanker. Wrecked and shattered buildings formed a background
to the scene, grim warning of what the enemy could do.
Miss Breen had been having a busy time with a very
ill patient whose pulse worried her. She was bending over him, her hands full,
when the first bomb dropped. The concussion threw her on the floor. She was
scrambling up again to rescue her scattered equipment when a cry of ‘Stay
there, Sister, for God’s sake!’ checked her.
She remained, crouching on the floor of the coach,
while the entire load of the bomber shrieked down. The sound of splintering
metal and glass was everywhere. The ambulance train shook, appeared to sway at
each blow. Breen raised her head, to see what was happening to her patient, but
he was out of her line of sight on his bunk.
The railway sheds had been hit. Shards of wood and
metal were tossed in the air. The rattle of machine gun bullets hitting the
sides of the ambulance coaches was succeeded by another salvo of bombs. Sister
Breen had lost the power to count; she only longed for the noise to stop, for
the last bomb to shake the ground, for the world to turn upright again.
Incoherently she was thinking, ‘So long as they don’t hit the train, so long as
they don’t hit the train.’
And then the sound of the aeroplane engines died
away. And the train had not been hit. As she struggled up, Breen had one moment
in which to breathe a thanksgiving for this.
Then she smelt burning.
Could it be the train after all? She ran down the
coach on legs that trembled. She leapt down. The railway line was strewn with
the dead and the dying. Walking patients who had jumped down from the train to
seek greater safety in shelters across the yards, they had been machine-gunned
as they ran. They lay now like dolls tossed out of a carriage window by a
naughty child.
She stopped by a khaki-clad figure and was bending
to examine him when she was recalled to the smell that had brought her out ‒
the smell of burning, now strong in the air. Smoke was drifting across the
siding, veiling the sun. What was on fire? She raced down the train, but by the
grace of God it had not been directly hit, only damaged by bullets and flying
debris and broken glass.
It was then that she saw the flames from the tanker.
The fire was spreading rapidly. The tanker’s hulk
was totally enveloped in red and black: the Maid of Kent was a
holocaust: and as she watched, awe-struck, great tongues of fire licked out and
swept the Brighton.
The ambulance train was directly alongside.
Miss Breen’s ward on the train was full of stretcher
cases, men too ill to help themselves. With the heat from the blazing vessels
already like a scorching breath on her cheeks, she half-turned and made a move
towards the stationary, helpless ambulance coaches. But she could not handle a
stretcher by herself.
‘Here,’ she called urgently to a man who appeared
from the direction of the sheds, ‘help me with the stretcher cases.’
He hesitated. ‘But, Sister, I’ve no orders to ‒’
Orders? She could hardly believe her ears. ‘Orders
or not, they’ve got to be moved to safety. Good heavens, man, the train will be
on fire in five seconds!’
Reluctantly, his eyes on the spreading fire whose
red fingers reached out to the quayside, he went with her. They took an end
each of the first stretcher. Breen found she was trembling a little, but they
hefted up the stretcher and manoeuvred it through the doorway.
‘I’ll take that,’ a voice said.
She relinquished her end to the waiting hands of the
R.A.M.C. orderly. Sister Cullen was in the ward by this time, activated by an
equal anxiety, so it was safe to leave her in charge of its evacuation.
The smell of burning and the sensation of heat
warned her to hurry. She glanced along the train. Flames were blazing out of
the coaches a few yards away, a pall of smoke was forming over it. The heat was
more intense, the sound of crackling louder, the smell of melting paint,
twisting metal, scorching metal, melting glass, all urged her to hurry, hurry.
Coughing and panting for breath, she hastened to the
other wards.
‘Mind where you’re going, Sister!’ Her way was
blocked. A private, his leg in a Thomas splint, was hobbling towards her by
holding on to the sides of the beds. Others were crowding behind him, a sight
that racked Breen’s heart, with their splinted and plastered limbs supporting
them as best they might.
‘Don’t go in there, Sister ‒ it’s full of
gas. And you haven’t got a gas mask.’
Gas! Everything for the last few days had been so
new, so unexpected and so terrible that for a moment she really believed it.
And she hesitated.
Her hesitation could have been the signal for panic
among these wounded and bewildered men. But at once her strong common sense
came to her rescue, and the momentary threat to morale was overcome.
‘It’s the fumes from the burning tanker ‒
it isn’t gas, it’s smoke.’ Nervously they eyed her, and seeing she was
quite sure she was right they followed meekly when she said, ‘Now come along,
back to bed.’
Coaxing, soothing, supporting them, she got them to
bed again in the unwrecked part of the train. The rest had caught fire as she
had foreseen. Once the smoke began to clear they felt completely reassured,
these unsettled patients; Sister said it was all right, didn’t she? The wards
were calming down again, but the roaring of the flames from the burning ships,
the hurtling of red-hot metal from the tanker, did little to help.
The O.C. was having the undamaged part of the train
uncoupled: in the sheds the M.O.s were attending to the men who had been
wounded by machine gun fire. Breen found one casualty actually under the train,
where he had fallen on being hit. If the wheels had moved, he would have been
crushed to death. She called stretcher bearers and helped move him to safety
while the wrecked coaches and the unwrecked were separated.
And then she straightened and drew breath. Grubby
dress, smoke-grimed face, eyes rimmed with red, shoes and stockings soiled …
Those snowy wards of her peacetime years seemed far, far away now. And yet, she
said to herself as she glanced about to see where else she might be needed, I
wouldn’t exchange this for the best run ward in England: I’m glad I
volunteered.
Next
moment she was back at work, a busy, upright figure in a grey dress and a
scarlet tippet.
Nurses at War is available in Ebook format only. Available from:
Amazon
Growing up in the 1930’s, Bernard Osborn developed a fascination with
flying. He would visitnearby airfields and peer through the boundary
fences just to catch a glimpse of aircraft. It was on a visit to an
Empire Air Day display and seeing a Hawker Hurricane for the first time
that spurred his dream to become a fighter pilot.
Plymouth suffered the most devastating aerial bombing onslaught during
World War Two, matched only by the impacts on London and Coventry.
Civilian fatalities reached 1,172, casualties 4,448, while over the
course of the war 3,754 houses were destroyed and a further 18,398
seriously damaged. The city survived, as did the spirit of its
residents, signified by the famous Resurgam sign nailed above the door
of the ruined church of St Andrew's. From 1945 to 1955, one of the most
remarkable civic planning and building exercises ever seen in Europe was
undertaken, resulting in the building of 17,000 new homes. The city of
Plymouth as it is known today owes its shape and structure to the war
and the succeeding years of rebuilding.
Nurses at War -The True Story of Army Nursing Sisters' Courage in World War Two by Jean Bowden remembers the brave nursing sisters of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), known with admiration by their grateful patients as the ‘Q.A.s’.
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