Hospitals Flapping in the Wind

#2 Canadian General Hospital in Le Tréport, France - Collections Canada

Many of the military hospitals in France and Belgium, including those well behind the lines on the French coast, housed the wounded (and staff) in tents. The winters of 1916-17 and 1917-18 were brutal - among the coldest in living memory - which made life miserable as well as difficult for staff and patients alike. These tents were occasionally blown down in storms, which were all too frequent on that windy north coast. Three hospitals were virtually levelled in a gale in August, 1917.

Some of these tented and hutted hospitals had 2000 or more beds, and with the additional accommodations and facilities required for medical and support staff, were like small towns.

During an offensive, a hospital like the 1st Canadian General at Etaples could have 600 admissions a day. In 1917, that hospital alone admitted 40,500 wounded and ill men. It's delightful to see that there was still time and care taken to bandage a dog's paw, as seen in the photo above.

The largest CWGC cemetery in France, at Etaples, with 11,000 WW1 graves - photo copyright Melanie Wills 

Although seemingly well behind the front lines, the base hospitals were occasionally hit in bombing raids. During one on May 19, 1918, over 60 staff and patients were killed and 80 wounded at the 1st Canadian General, while there were another 250 casualties among the other hospitals in the Etaples district. Contrary to the Geneva Convention, these hospitals had been placed next to vital military installations that were legitimate targets for the German bombers. The middle and right graves at the front of this photo are those of a Canadian doctor and nurse killed in that attack.

Some of my characters work in these hospitals in Elusive Dawn.

At Home With the Astors

The Author at Cliveden

Once owned by Waldorf and Nancy Astor, Cliveden is a magnificent estate on the Thames near Maidenhead, England. At the outbreak of the Great War, the Astors generously donated their indoor tennis court and bowling alley to the Canadian Red Cross to be used as a hospital. Lots of additions were made, and it became The Duchess of Connaught Hospital, which is where some of my characters nurse and convalesce. 

Nancy visited the wounded regularly, and was very popular with them and the staff. Although an American, Vicountess Nancy Astor became the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons, in 1919.

There are 42  WW1 war graves – mostly Canadian - in a lovely secret and sunken garden on the estate. The Astors donated part of their extensive grounds to the Canadians again in WW2, and a more substantial hospital was built. It functioned as the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital until the 1980s.

The Author at Cliveden - photo copyright Melanie Wills

Cliveden is now a luxury hotel, where I enjoyed a delightful lunch last summer. That famous portrait of Nancy in the background was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1909.

Hospitals with Chandeliers

Duchess of Westminster Hospital, Le Touquet, France

The young Duchess of Westminster, like so many others, was eager to do “her bit” for the war effort, so she turned her seaside villa in Le Touquet France into a hospital with the help of the Red Cross. In the early days of the war, she and her friends would dress in full evening regalia, including diamond tiaras, to greet the incoming wounded whatever time of day. "It's the least we can do to cheer up the men," the Duchess would say, her wolfhound at her side. Her villa soon became too small, and her hospital took over the local Casino, which is probably what we see in the photo above. I couldn’t resist creating the fictional Duchess of Axminster’s hospital on the French coast in Elusive Dawn.

Rothschild Villa Strassburg, Deauville, France [by Kamel 15- GNU General Public Licence]

Other private estates were offered as convalescent homes. Canadian VAD Violet Wilson accepted a position at this Rothschild villa in Deauville, France. Luxuries were provided by wealthy Canadians for officers recuperating from minor wounds and illnesses. Violet was rather disgusted that she was little more than a glorified housemaid, just serving tea and so forth. But the benefit of this resort-like place to the officers was evident in this newspaper article.

Canadian Convalescent Hospital, Bearwood Park

Bearwood Convalescent Hospital in Woking, England had been a private home with 90 bedrooms, belonging to the widow of the Times newspaper owner. It housed 900 Canadian soldiers. The Canadian Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) funded and set up a Red Cross officers’ hospital in London. The Red Cross also arranged for convalescing officers to spend up to a month as guests at country houses in England, or failing that, in hotels.

Officers and nurses were often sent to the Riviera on sick leave. Famous poet-doctor, Lieutenant-Colonial John McCrae (who wrote "In Flanders Fields"), spent 3 weeks at Cap Martin in late 1916 recovering from pleurisy. The balmy weather and absence of shellfire and air raids undoubtedly provided a relaxing and healthful retreat – a temporary reprieve from the mud and blood of war.

Volunteer Angels of Mercy

“Short of actually going to bed with [the men], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years,” wrote Vera Brittain, one of the most renowned Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses of the First World War, in Testament of Youth. Like Vera, VADs were generally from genteel, sheltered, and chaperoned backgrounds, because only people of means could afford to pay for the courses and work for free.

Lady Diana Manners, 1916 - photo by E.O. Hoppe

Some were aristocrats, like Lady Diana Manners – reputedly the most beautiful woman in England and expected to marry the Prince of Wales. Her mother was opposed to Diana’s becoming a VAD, and “explained in words suitable to my innocent ears that wounded soldiers, so long starved of women, inflamed with wine and battle, ravish and leave half-dead the young nurses who wish only to tend them.” The Duchess gave in, but “knew, as I did, that my emancipation was at hand,” Diana says in her memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, and admits, “I seemed to have done nothing practical in all my twenty years.” Nursing plunged her and other young women into a life-altering adventure.

Growing up with servants, many of these girls had never had to wash a plate or boil an egg. But with only a few weeks of training by St. John Ambulance in First Aid and Home Nursing, women over 20 became qualified to work under the guidance of professional nurses, who usually resented these amateur “do-gooders”. Of course, many lied about their age!

While VADs spent much of their time changing linens, sterilizing equipment, serving meals, and so forth, they were just as readily asked to hold down the exposed intestines of a mortally wounded soldier, as was Canadian Doreen Gery on her first day in a British military hospital. Her protest to the Nursing Sister that she would rather die than do that, earned the retort, “Well, die then! You’re no good to me if you can’t do the work!” Like other VADs, Doreen valiantly got on with the job. Giving up was considered the equivalent of cowardice in a soldier.

In makeshift hospital cities of tents or wooden huts near the battlefields there was no running water, rats scurried about under the beds, and the tents sometimes collapsed in fierce gales that howled off the English Channel during two of the coldest winters in living memory. Wounded often streamed into these base hospitals filthy and crawling with lice. One VAD, after two weeks of unending work, discovered that she had “collected some of the notorious ‘grey-backs’… when I was brushing my hair, and I was so exhausted that I just collapsed in tears. It seemed the last straw.”

VADs who later became famous included American aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who worked at the Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, and Agatha Christie, who dispensed drugs, thus learning about poisons, which she later used in writing her mysteries.

In ElusiveDawn, one of my intrepid characters becomes a VAD, and sees service in England and France, as did 500 other Canadian women.