ANZAC GIRLS: The Extraordinary Story of our World War I Nurses
By Peter Rees
Allen&Unwin. 363pp. $29.99.
Sister Alice Ross-King was on duty at the Second Australian Casualty Clearing Station near Armentieres in France in July 1917 when the Germans began a bombardment on the hospital. Summoned to a delirious pneumonia patient, shewas walking along the duckboards behind Private John Wilson, an orderly, when a bomb fell near them blowing a crater two metres deep.
In her diary Ross-Kinglater recorded, "The noise was so terrific and the concussion so great that I was thrown to the ground and had no idea where the damage was.
When shegot up she raced along the duckboards to check her patients. "The next thing I knew I went over into a bomb crater. I shall never forget the awful climb on hands and feet out of that hole about five feet deep, greasy clay and blood, though I did not know then that it was blood."
Ross-Kingfound that the tent with her pneumonia patient had collapsed and she shouted for help. Eventually someone got it up again and she found her patient crouching on the ground at the back of his stretcher. She leant across the stretcher and tried to lift him in. She recalled, "I had my right arm under a leg which I thought was [the patient's], but when I lifted it I found to my horror that it was a loose leg with a boot and puttee on it."
It was Private Wilson's leg, which had been blown off. Next day, they found his torso up a tree about 20 metres away.
Ross-Kingwrote that she had no very clear recollection of what followed but apparently she carried on with the job. Three other nurses, Clare Deacon, Dorothy Cawood and Mary-Jane Derrer, also carried on and showed conspicuous bravery, but thought little more of it. A month after the German raid the commander of 1 Anzac Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, wrote to inform the four nurses that they would be awarded Military Medals.
This incident in the life of Alice Ross-King is a memorable moment in Peter Rees' book Anzac Girls, the often-forgotten story of nurses from Australia and New Zealand who served in the World War I. By the end of the war 45 Anzac nurses had died on overseas service. Alice Ross-King was one of more than 200 who had been decorated. Their story has inspired the ABC TV series but those who watch that series should also read this absorbing and moving book.
The author is a journalist and, with a flair for story-telling, he uses the diaries and letters of particular women to show the impact of the war on them, both professionally and personally. Sister Ross-King was one of them. In a brief review it is quite impossible to do justice to this profoundly moving book. She was only one of many nurses who showed strength, dignity and devotion to duty in some of the most frightful battles of history.
The war diaries of Alice Ross-King, born in Ballarat in 1891, are now in the Australian War Memorial, and I hope that they may be published in full. Peter Rees makes full use of them in his story. There is an outline of her remarkable career in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (volume 11), but only her diaries give a personal and deeply emotional perspective on her life. She had a doomed love affair with an officer named Harry Moffitt of the 53rd Battalion, who was killed at Fromelles in July 1916, while he was going to the aid of Lieutenant-Colonel Norris, who was leading the battalion. Neither body was ever recovered.
After the war Alice married a medical officer, Major Sydney Appleford, who had served in Egypt and France. They settled at Lang Lang in Gippsland, Victoria, and raised four children, but, as the author writes, there was a part of her that stored a private grief for Harry Moffitt. The author comments that her personal records show what a remarkable woman Riss-Kingwas and were crucial to understanding the effect of the war on her in particular and nurses in general.
Anzac Girls tells an unforgettable story of the courage of Australian and New Zealand nurses in World War I. In the centenary years of that war it is sad that the story has taken so long to be told in an accessible form. If you read one book about the war this year, make it Anzac Girls.
