Maritime Massacre

Like soldiers, nurses were motivated to enlist for reasons that included duty to country and financial security. But a sense of adventure was often evident. Fraser’s surviving wartime diary (1914-15) conveys her excitement as she travelled with the first contingent. She recorded the names of the ships in the convoy and called them “a glorious sight this moonlight [sic] night. Alastair [sic] on Ruthenia. Wendell on Zealand [sic]. Moosejaw [sic] boys on Royal Edward directly in front.” She also recalled the excitement caused when a sailor fell off the Royal Edward, noting, “someone had thrown several life buoys to him” and “the other ships closed in around us,” and “we felt he was comparatively safe [the] only fear being that he might become ‘exhausted’ from cold.” The half -hour it took to get him back on board was clear proof to Fraser that “his swimming saved his life.” She also reported on-board card games with fellow officers, an “excellent concert in 2nd cabin at night,” a church service and lectures.

After landing in England, Fraser went with the nursing sisters to St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where Florence Nightingale had founded the first modern school of nursing in 1860. Fraser shopped for clothes and supplies and took in the sights. Evenings were filled with plays and days with stops at the Criterion Restaurant, famous for suffragist teas and a reference in a Sherlock Holmes novel. Likely due to the distinctive Canadian nursing uniform that earned them the nickname “bluebirds,” Fraser observed that “people take great delight in looking at us. Our only way of getting them to stop is to look at their big feet until they are simply forced to lower their eyes.”

Like soldiers, nurses were motivated to enlist for reasons that included duty to country and financial security.

Nurses in the Great War

Nursing sisters were initially granted the relative rank of lieutenant. Although they could rise in rank with promotions — Matron-in-Chief Margaret Macdonald, for example, held the rank of major — women could serve only as nursing sisters, even if they were physicians. Rank afforded nurses some significant privileges, but it was relative, meaning that their authority was limited to the supervision of orderlies (ranked below them) and nurses in the unit and patients. This kept nurses firmly under military command, unlike their counterparts in the British and American forces, who served in auxiliary forces headed by nurse matrons.

The evolving military medical system grew as the war advanced. Fraser’s first major assignment as a nursing sister was to France, with No. 2 Canadian Stationary Hospital, which was established at the luxurious Hôtel du Golf, near Étaples-sur-Mer, with 300 beds. But as the battle settled into trench warfare and casualties mounted, this hospital was enlarged and moved to Outreau (near Boulogne-sur-Mer) in the fall of 1915. More CAMC hospitals, most organized by university medical schools, were added throughout 1915 and 1916. By 1918, the CAMC managed 16 general and 10 stationary hospitals (each typically having 1,000 beds or more), 72 nursing sisters, 30 medical officers and 205 other ranks. As well, they operated four casualty clearing stations. Canada also used five hospital ships, of which Llandovery Castle was one. These ships brought home discharged soldiers and those deemed “medically unfit” for further service. Nurses worked at many of these sites.

A Nurse’s Wartime Experience

The No. 2 Canadian Stationary Hospital’s first convoy of 115 patients arrived on Dec. 4, 1914, “suffering mostly from swollen feet [trench foot], frost bite, and minor gunshot wounds,” Fraser noted in her diary. In his book First World War Honour Roll of Guysborough County, Nova Scotia Vol. 1, historian Bruce F. MacDonald writes that in a letter published later in a Moose Jaw newspaper, Fraser described treating Canadians wounded in the Second Battle of Ypres who had experienced the devastating chlorine gas attack at St. Julien, Belgium, on April 24, 1915.

Even when the cases weren’t severe, the work could be exhausting. According to MacDonald’s book, Fraser noted: “Last night [April 26, 1915] we were asleep when at 1 a.m. an overflow of 300 arrived, not bad cases, but up we had to get, and it was pathetic. Most of them were nearly starved.… They were fed and dressed and places made for them to sleep over night before we again laid our own heads to rest.”

“We haven’t a minute to ourselves and our minds are so much on our work and our poor boys. We can neither think nor talk of anything else.”

Fraser spent her first Christmas overseas with her brother and cousins in what local Nova Scotia historian James M. Cameron called “a circumvention of military security and red tape which was a unique accomplishment.” The two men were granted leave from their units in England, applied to the French Consulate for visas and travelled by ferry to Boulogne, where Fraser and her cousin Harriet met them in an ambulance. In December of 1915 and 1916, Fraser received leaves of absence of five days and two weeks, respectively.

Wartime nurses suffered emotional trauma from witnessing horrible injuries, knowing that some patients would never fully recover, experiencing the frustration of realizing they could offer little help, and comforting the dying. Many viewed soldiers with maternal or sisterly affection, and dismissed their own hardships in comparison with their “boys.” Nursing sisters wrote letters home for soldiers, sometimes informing a mother or wife of a deceased soldier’s last words; attended funerals; and placed flowers on the graves of those they lost.

Working conditions also took a toll. The unit diary of No. 2 CCS for Feb. 20, 1916, for example, noted “intense bombardment heard from the front all day long. Although 20 miles or more away our buildings shook and windows rattled.”

Even some of those serving in hospitals farther from the front often worked in tent wards or were housed in tents and huts; they offered minimal protection from the cold, rain and winds, which sometimes grew strong enough to blow down tents. 

Many nurses suffered from a mental illness similar to PTSD.

MacDonald believes that Fraser and her colleagues would want to be remembered as women who “selflessly responded to their country’s call to service in a time of need,” adding that they contributed “to the changes in women’s roles that occurred during the interwar years. While some eventually married and raised families after their discharge, others devoted their lives to nursing in a variety of capacities — public and military hospitals, public health and private nursing.”

Indeed, nursing, then still a relatively young profession, rose in status thanks to these women, as symbolized in Prime Minister Robert Borden’s extension of the right to vote to nursing sisters (along with the female relatives of servicemen) in 1917. While the move was also a political ploy to shore up support for his party and conscription, it nonetheless recognized nurses’ wartime service.

It is often said that truth is the first casualty of war. Admittedly, the German submarine U-86’s commander, Helmut Patzig, and his crew gave the Allied propaganda machine plenty of fodder when he managed to hit the hospital ship Llandovery Castle in its engine room, extinguishing all the lights immediately, preventing a distress call and sinking it within 10 minutes. Several lifeboats were launched and many of those that made it off the ship were rammed into and fired on, as if to destroy any evidence of their actions. Patzig accused survivors of carrying ammunition and harbouring American pilots.

Wartime posters focused most of their indignation on the 14 nurses. In a Victory Bonds poster, readers are told that buying the bonds would help stop this atrocity, showing a nurse lying helplessly in the arms of her male rescuer (see page 16). Interestingly, she is not wearing her bluebird uniform but one sporting a Red Cross, presumably meant to symbolize Allied outrage over the targeting of a well-lit hospital ship in contravention of the Hague Convention. The outrage was perhaps a bit disingenuous, given that this was certainly not the first German U-boat attack on a hospital ship — they occurred with increasing frequency by 1917.  

The title of the American poster “Spurlos Versenkt” refers to an alleged German policy (literally, “sunk without a trace”). The poster shows women in a lifeboat under attack, although no nursing sister had died that way. One Canadian officer allegedly told his troops to use “Llandovery Castle” as a battle cry during the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, which launched “Canada’s Hundred Days,” a series of offensives that closed out the war with a victory that cost many lives. 

We know little of what the nurses thought of these depictions. But nursing sisters knew the risks they took in boarding a hospital ship or, for that matter, working in a casualty clearing station, and accepted them as part of their duty as military officers.