A Letter Home from a Victoria Nursing Sister

A vivid description of what it was like to serve in those field hospitals in the last year of the war is contained in a letter from a nursing sister published by the Victoria Daily Colonist in early August 1918. Phyllis Green wrote to her mother:

Since June 5 we have had an awful time. Three thousand wounded Americans have passed through our hands, and the past three weeks seemed like a nightmare. The US Marines went into action and got pretty well blown to cinders, and our ambulance was the nearest one from the front for the gravest cases needing urgent attention. The park is full of tents of wounded. Even the village church has been turned into a temporary ward, sixteen operating tables going at once, night and day.

I shall never in all my life forget the first two nights after the arrival of the first detachment of these poor wounded. The stretchers came up the stair in one perpetual stream, the clothes of the men were cut off them, and in turn they went on the tables and had their operations. They then were replaced on the stretchers and taken back to the ambulances (as soon as they were out of ether), and shipped on to Paris: only the amputations and severe shock cases were put into bed. We gave morphine to every man upon arrival, so there was not much suffering from discomfort as one would imagine. Some of the stretchers when we uncovered them had carried men already dead. It has been terrible.

I have been in charge of the Shock Ward and believe me, if it had not been for a good, kind YMCA clergyman who sat with the dying continually, I don’t know what I should have done. What with cutting the clothes off the dying, so as to get them into the operating room, and giving them hypos as quickly as I could shoot, I had not a moment for the poor dying boys. But this good YMCA clergyman is the best, or rather one of the best, men I have ever known—sincere and quiet…

But the sad and dreadful sights of this month of June. We have evacuated as many as possible today as there is an American drive now without pause night and day. We expect the wounded in an avalanche any hour, and there is at the present moment a raid going on. The Germans are overhead, and every cannon within ten miles is firing. We have had this raid affair for the last four nights. Last night was the worst. The noise was tremendous! But they did not reach Paris, only the environs.

For the moment, good bye, dearest mother. We will have a good time together yet. Don’t worry.

Your loving Phyllis

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