ANZAC Girls (2014, first published
2008 as The Other ANZACS) is a work of non-fiction about Australian and New
Zealand nurses in World War I from 1914 to 1918. In 1914 when the war
commenced, Australia had a population of five million, with 2,498 nurses
attending 331,781 soldiers sent to serve overseas – of them nearly 62,000 were
killed (19%) and 153,500 (46%) were casualties sustaining injuries. New Zealand
sent 610 nurses to attend to 128,000 enlisted men from a total population of
1.1 million – by the end of the war 16,000 (12.5%) were killed and 41,300 (32%)
were injured. Sixty-five Australian and New Zealand nurses received medals for
their distinguished service.
The nurses of WWI were civilians,
qualified nurses, between 21-40 years old, and single or widowed. To marry
meant termination of duties in the field. Nurses rose to the status of ANZACs
(the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) – army officers – in May 1916 –
halfway into the war. Previously nuns treated the wounds of overseas soldiers –
but not below the waist! Nurses not only attended to wounds, but also to
traumas, shock, dysentery, typhus, flu, and venereal diseases. In Cairo while
waiting deployment to the battlefields 2,000 Australian soldiers contracted
venereal diseases in four months from the end of 1914 to February 1915.
On April 25, 1915, troops were sent to
war – this is now the date of the annual commemoration of ANZAC Day in
Australia and New Zealand. The battlefield was Gallipoli in the Dardanelles,
Turkey, to assist the 14,000 British and French forces. By mid-May, barely a
month into battle, news of the high numbers of deaths and casualties stunned
the public back home. In two months, from September and October 1915, 57,000
sick and 37,000 wounded men were evacuated from the beaches of Gallipoli – and
there were only 9,000 beds (half of them Australian). Understaffed, and
under-equipped, the nurses attended to a myriad of war wounds. “I
got such a nice boy in haemorrhaging and was taken to theatre, operated on,
returned to ward with my hat pin through his neck” (to staunch bleeding), wrote
one nurse in a letter to her parents. While Australian deaths were high, the
death of French soldiers out-numbered everyone – due to their brilliant blue
uniforms that were a clear target in the field.
Of the 28 hospital ships in service in
the Mediterranean, three were always anchored off Gallipoli. Nurses were not
allowed on land until stationary hospitals were established. “The presence of
women within the sound of the guns at the Dardanelles was an affront to some
officers, who argued that male orderlies would do just as well as the nurses
this close to the front.” The patients thought otherwise. By the time wounded
soldiers were transported from the beaches to the ships, it was often too late.
But by August 1915, some tents were established as hospitals on land to be closer to
the front.
Rees also describes the death of 10
New Zealand nurses and 57 soldiers when the Marquette
was torpedoed on the morning of October 23, 1915. Forty nurses were aboard at
the time, and some floated for up to seven hours in the sea before being
rescued by two French and one British destroyer.
With the Gallipoli campaign over, nurses either went home or were relocated to France at the beginning of 1916 –
to the Western Front – to places such as Le Havre, Rouen, Etaples, Boulogne, or
Marseilles. Before the war ended 46,000 Australian and 12,500 New Zealand
soldiers would die on the Western Front.
Rees tells the narratives through
archived information and the personal letters and diaries of nurses overseas and
relatives remaining at home. Post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet been
recognized yet it is clearly depicted in the nurses’ letters.
So too were the effects of nerve gases – first used by Germany in the Second
Battle of Ypres just nine months after the war started. By the time the war
ended 185,000 troops had “suffered its effects.”
News of Armistice arrived on November
11, 1918. Bells across the United Kingdom rang at 11:00am. Each year this date
and time are commemorated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.
By the end of World War I, 28
Australian nurses died – their names appear on the Australian World War I
Nurses Honour Roll at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and 17 New
Zealand nurses (10 of them on the Marquette).
In October 1999 the Australian government unveiled a memorial to Australian
nurses who served in all wars. It appears midway down Anzac Parade, on the
southern side, near the War Memorial in Canberra.
Rees has written a remarkable book,
with extensive photographs, that captures the daily lives of nurses at the
front – their service to duty, their hardships, their witness and written
journals of historic events and times, as well as their flirting and romances,
and of the relief to see the recovery of soldiers in their care, and their
despair at the countless lives lost. Their losses were extreme – soldiers in
battle, soldiers in hospitals, doctors, brothers, lovers, fiancées, and nursing
colleagues.
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