ANZAC Girls: The Extraordinary Story of our World War I Nurses by Peter Rees: book review

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.