XXII
MISS EVELYN LYNE AND MISS MADGE GREG
Inaddition to their great hospital work, the Joint Societies of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John have established many of what may be called the additional links in the long hospital chain which stretches with such perfect organisation from the spot where the soldier is wounded on the battlefield to the point where he is able to return with renewed strength to duty. The accounts which follow of the experiences of two workers illustrate the similar lives of many other “V.A.Ds.”
MISS EVELYN LYNE MISS MADGE GREGTo face page119
MISS EVELYN LYNE MISS MADGE GREG
To face page119
Miss Evelyn Lyne went to France in October, 1914, as cook in the first Voluntary Aid Detachment to be sent abroad. The detachment was to start a rest station at one of the base railway stations for feeding and re-dressing the wounded as they came through in the hospital trains from the front. A series of railway luggage-vans drawn up on a siding had to serve as the headquarters of the detachment, which Miss Lyne described as follows: “We had very hard work and great fun scrubbing and disinfecting the vans; they looked beautiful when finished, and were equipped as a kitchen, dispensary, dressing station, store-room and common room respectively. No one would believe what a charming kitchen a railwaytruck made. Besides the kitchen we had a very long fire burning between old railway lines arranged at the right distance to support the huge pots for making cocoa, six pots at a time, so that we could have enough for 300 boiling at once. We worked day and night at the rest station in twelve-hour shifts, and, being a humble cook, it was my lot to stand for hours over the fire stirring cocoa, sometimes in the pouring rain, and with smoke belching into my eyes.” As a rule the rest-station workers were given only an hour’s warning of the arrival of a hospital train, and then had to prepare food for from 300 to 800 wounded men. When the trains came in, the workers would take their cauldrons of cocoa or soup and baskets of food on handcarts to the carriages. “No words can ever express how splendid the wounded men were,” wrote Miss Lyne: “one never heard a complaint, and we were so thankful to be able to do just that little for them.”
Later Miss Lyne was sent to cook for between eighty and ninety nurses at their billet in an old château at one of the hospital bases. This was hard work indeed, for she was the only cook, and had eight meals a day to serve. The nurses were on Army rations, so a whole sheep or the quarter of a bullock would be left at the door daily, and Miss Lyne soon became an expert butcher! When later she had to return to England she wrote: “I shall always look back on those days in France as the happiest time of my life.” She is now working as an inspector of hostels under the Ministry of Munitions.
Miss Madge Greg has been doing rest-station work since January, 1915, and has been quartered at various stations on the lines of communication.Starting a new station entails hard work, and the workers need to show resource and quickness, and the ability to adapt their arrangements on the instant to existing conditions, however inconvenient and uncomfortable they may be. Railway trucks or a goods shed have had to be transformed in a few hours into a spotlessly clean dressing station, where men could be brought from the improvised ambulance trains to have their wounds re-dressed.
On one occasion the unit with which Miss Greg was working received a message that unexpected special trains were on their way, and could not be drawn up at the existing rest station. Within an hour the workers managed to get their stores and apparatus moved round to another part of the line. “And,” writes Miss Greg, “by 7 a.m. we had everything in readiness within the new dressing station, and ten boilers of hot cocoa out near the trains. There followed days and nights of continuous hard work, and more trains than ever before—this was our experience of the battle of Loos.”
With time the rest stations were housed in proper huts, and also, as the number of fully-equipped hospital trains increased, the need for dressings was no longer so urgent. A later development has been an arrangement for small wards at some of the rest stations, where bad cases could be brought from the trains and 48-hour cases from among the local troops could be treated.
In many ways rest-station duty is very trying, for the work is necessarily so unevenly divided. Times of rush come after the heavy fighting, when there is no respite by day or night. But workers like Miss Greg and her companions never spare themselvesfatigue or effort. The only thing that matters is that no ambulance train should find them unprepared, no wound should suffer for want of fresh dressing, no cold, tired soldier should be disappointed of his hot drink. The rushes are followed by long periods when there is hardly enough work to fill the day, and the girls become conscious of the grim, draughty surroundings of the railway station, which form the entire horizon of their life. They have, however, found many other little ways of service, such as undertaking all the laundry arrangements for the sisters nursing permanently on the ambulance trains, starting a lending library, and doing “little things” for the soldiers on the leave trains. It is just in the doing of these “little things” that Red Cross workers, amongst whom Miss Greg and Miss Lyne are typical, are performing such valuable service. There is little excitement and no limelight in a life such as they lead, and it entails hard work at any hour of the day or night, whenever they may happen to be called upon. But their reward lies in the moments of cheer and brightness which they have been able to bring to so many thousands of suffering men, in that never-ending procession of pain ebbing away from the battlefields. Their kind ministrations have changed a dreary wait in a cold, dull station into an episode that soldiers who have passed through will remember with thankfulness—a moment of respite, bringing new courage, warmth, and comfort when all were sorely needed.