Anna in the Forrest of Dean

Anna was told to wait for her medical talk by Dr Morris which was a requirement of the Medical Directorate. All school nurses were to have some knowledge of the major illnesses so that they could recognise the symptom’s when visiting schools. The major ones to be watched for where diphtheria, measles, mumps, and scarlet fever, all of which would be liable to spread far and wide. Each symptom was outlined. The minor ones,scabies,ringworm and lice where up to her to treat. They were already well-known to her. She nodded in agreement.

The hospital had received a note from the Queens Nurses in London advising against children being excluded from school to protect uninfected children on the grounds that their friends only waited outside the school gates to play with them.The advise was to ignore nits as these were only the empty egg shells of lice. With active lice the advice was,

“Comb when wet as the lice would be stationary. They would run away when raked in dry hair.”

She was issued with her own lice comb which she added to her small box of first aid. With the issue of a Rover cycle Anna was detailed to assist school nurses and midwives on pre and post natal visits when called for in the Forest on demand. The hardships of the war were evident even both outside the door and inside where the large ward was filled with four rows of beds, all close together beneath the Union Jack flags hanging from the beams.

Beyond the hospital the shops still had paper and colourful cloth banners rejoicing in the return of the Coleford Doctor`s son, albeit blinded, but with the V.C. One of the new Red Cross motorised ambulances was at the very door as Anna stepped out to her new assignment. Her first job was to understudy the midwife in the Milkwall area who she was to meet at the new village hall. She understood all this from the Sister who set her on the way, who gave her details as she popped Anna and her old cycle on the train. “As a treat, my dear, to save your legs”.

“That Mrs Mills has had many a jobs other than midwife: firstly a nurse at under the instructions of Dr Bangara, soon married she has a family, cleans the school,is a midwife, as I’ve said, and lays out the dead! beautifully, I might add.” She had to stop, even if only to take a breath.”You could not be in better hands!”

Anna was at a complete loss but she did realise that the Sister had sent her by train to ensure she arrived at the halt.

“Goodness sake,girl. Here is the address!”

Anna found the new hall easily enough and it was but a moment before a woman bustled in greeting her with a cry.

“Thank Goodness nurse, come and sit down and I will tell you of the situation. Things are getting tough around here. As with other places in Glos most of the men are gone, food is getting short and that`s not helping, the kids are under nourished and what babies we have are skinny little things. Get you out visiting them. By the way,” she went on, “Most of the villages around here have a refugee from Belgium. Some are taken in for free, others try to find work but most are pretty hopeless things! But it may feel you less homesick.”

Anna was soon to get to know the beauty of the Forest on the old push bike, up and down the hills, asking the way from friendly people, speaking with her pedantic English accent and smelling the forest air, which was such a relief from the stink of London

Reaching Lydney

 

She knew!  She knew!

Was it a swirl of coat tails, a half-remembered stance or just the tickle of a nerve? The man talking to the horse dealer at the Gloster cattle market had, surely, had been following since that day in Regents Park, way back in London.

Gathering herself she linked arms with a surprised girl, merry on cider, who was walking toward the station and hurried on, without looking back.

The train arrived at Lydney and Anna had no difficulty in finding the hospital. It was in the old Town Hall and the ticket collector`s direction was clear and direct. At the entrance she asked for the Matron, Mrs Bowles.

“Good gracious me, you mean the Commandant,” laughed the nurse. “Do not forget it! If you are to get anywhere!”

Indeed the Commandant was a figure to be respected. She approached in her uniform, standing tall but, without doubt, exhausted.

” So, what have we here?” She declared. “Belgian auxiliary in a very sorry state! Come with me, girl, and tell me your story!”

“Came from the Front with a hospital ship, nursed amongst the girls in the Post Office tents in Regents Park, followed the Belgian wounded to Gloucester. I got fed up with washing bandages, heard you were needing more nurses with Lydney`s hospital extra beds and hear I am!”

“Well, we can do with extra help, especially in the Forest, with so many  men away. The mothers are in need. Interested?”

Anna nodded.

“That`s good,”  replied the Commandant.

“Off with that dirty old uniform; you are in the Red Cross now.” She reached forward and without any further a-do, snatched Anna`s cloak off, bend down and emptied Anna`s old bag on the floor of her office. The heavy Luger pistol crashed down on the floorboards.

“You will not want that anymore.” She raised her toe and the Luger slid under her desk with the impact. Anna was speechless with shock! Her dispatcher gone! Holding down a bubble of panic which filled her mouth she was dumb!

The Commandant was quite unperturbed. ‘Did every nurse she interviewed, come armed with a long barrelled pistol?’ No. But tiredness overwhelmed her before she fully realised what had happened. War had brought constant surprises but this was a new one.

Anna gathered herself and spluttered  out a mixed story of needing a weapon in the Front Line and in the Recuss areas where she was nursing wounded German as well as British. But, no, she did not know how to use it. Just to show would be enough!

It all happened in a second! The Commandant had disarmed her in an instant. Now she had nothing but her hands! All her training went by the board. She was on her own.

 

Chapter thirty-six ~ At Gloster market

The sluice girl turned up. Anna had dreamt of her coming back to the fold. Her visualisation of a dumpy creature, generous arms encased in a tightly filled blouse and wild hair, fulfilled her dream. She was thankful for the expected release from the odious and unremitting task but that depended on some tact with the Supervisor!! Thankfully the one-sided  conversation was of thanks for all the help given in a  time of domestic crises. They chatted about her future.

“Write! Write a postcard to Miss Bowles, at Lydney VA Hospital. They have just taken over the Craft School and thus added to the 150 beds they have at  the Town Hall! I am sure they need extra nursing. Stay here until you hear from her!” The Super’ could not have been more helpful.

Anna took herself to town. It was market day. She followed the  crowd, most alighting from Stroud and Stonehouse at the station to down by the River Severn. She chatted to some girls of her own age to find out that cheeses were main purchase that they sought, followed by, maybe, a glass of cider!

The market was noted for the sale of barren cows but there was plenty to look at of a more domestic nature. There was much support for the war effort, Recruitment, parcels for the Front, Knitting groups sat around tables knitting comforters, socks and gloves on needles, ‘made from bone in Stroud…’  she was told with great pride. An old man sat on a wagon painted with a farm address in Dymock.

“Are you from the Forest?” She asked?

“No,” he laughed. ” I would be stoned if I went there with this wagon. Are you interest in the Dean? Go and speak to the horse people”. He pointed the way.

Anna knew about the importance of horses to all armies, especially the Second German Army that followed the British retreat from Mons covering 200 miles in quick advance into France. Horses, eighty thousand of them, just for this one movement. She remembered thirty-six horses had been needed to pull each of the huge Howitzers that pulverised the Belgian fortresses, and her pulse beat. The horseman, gaiter’d and breeched, sat on a bale of straw, ready enough to speak to the nurse in the wornout cloak. He told he came from Coleford, luckily the first lot of requisioned horses were to be over 15 hands while the Forest folk preferred the smaller animals for timber hauling and pulling coal wagons and trolleys, sometime down the larger mines.

“Time would tell,” he went on. “There were only a few Clydesdale heavies around and the Army wanted these above all. Have to import them. Mules and all from foreign parts”. He tickled Anna with straw! ” Why the interest” ?

Anna took a totally unacceptable risk.

Chapter thirty-three ~ St Dunstan’s

With such a number of girls working in one place, rumours abounded at the Post Office sorting office in Regent’s Park. Some were nice, some really horrid. Anna’s meagre knowledge of English made Cockney accents, the London dialect, almost impossible to decipher, but she came to realise, nay feel, that some chatter was about herself. A group would gather, then quietly part as her eye caught a gossip’s glance. She knew that some concerns where due to her total lack of nursing natural to a normal girl. Her own experience hardly helped on such matters, mostly bodily fluid problems and affairs of the heart.

As the lions roared just before their morning feed, Anna hoped they would not escape from the Zoo. Would the girls gang upon her and feed her to their carnivores? Anna’s senses told her they might. Looking back on her past, she decided to use a weekend off to call upon her blind patients. Just to speak Flemish would be a relief from the endless girlish giggles.

It was doubtful if Anna would be recognised at St Dunstan’s Lodge, after all nearly all were blind.  It was the staff who were glad to see her. She asked if it were possible to sleep in the Lodge. They explained that night nursing required Flemish speakers, as on many occasion a patient woke up either racked by nightmares or pain, and no one could understand to quell his fears. This was the nursing that she knew.

The matron at St Dunstan’s was more than willing to approach the Post Office surgery and ask for a transfer. Not surprisingly they agreed, adding that Anna could be more trouble than she was worth. There was a problem in that her Aliens Identification Card that, as yet, not arrived, but they said they would happily forward it.

The garden at St Dunstan’s was very large with access to part of the lake. This was ringed with a few benches that Anna led some of the soldiers to so they could take the sun and talk. Most had been gassed by chlorine and had burnt eyes. Their only defence on the front had been to hold a cloth soaked in urine to their faces. Curiously, such is chemistry, the reaction did help.

There was sometimes much to talk about, other-times not a word. But holding a hand helped. Anna’s thoughts during these silent moments turned to Elspeth Schragmuller, the Fraulein Docktor who had set her on this course with all its odd routes. Holding the fingers of a wounded Belgian soldier? Unlikely but true!

Sacrifice was the Docktor’s doctrine, destroy one to draw attention away from the expertise of another. She was a superlative spy master but did she understand the loneliness of the assassin who, under no circumstances was to communicate, whatever the temptation? All assassins knew that another of his like, or hers, would follow.

Anna pondered. It was War, she thought. We are all disposable.

Chapter thirty-two ~ Regents Park

Most of the coal on the dockside in Newport was from The Black Vein Steam Coal Co, held in eight ton loads in wagons of the Gloucester Wagon Co. Each would have to be searched by hand.  The 6710 loco was called upon to haul wreckage apart and she puffed and shunted along the rails hauling away with ropes and chain. The dock rigged up a belt system to move the coal after inspection.

Room 40 was fully aware of a successful bomber of shipping was in Britain. He specialised in planting explosives in the hulls of ships in dock and on slipways. It was considered that he paid large sums of money to dockhands to place the innocuous parcels aboard rather than placing it himself.

*******

Anna realised that she was not a nurse!

Yes, she could cleanse a severe wound of mud, fragments of bone, congealing blood and other debris. She could stem an artery, apply a tourniquet, set a minor fracture and apply morphia, calm a patient and go some way to alleviate pain to those who were gassed. But, she had never explored the trauma of birth, hysteria and the common ailments of a mass of females and was at a loss how to explain it to the staff in the post office surgery. There was no choice but to persevere. Her Alien card had yet to arrive and Anna was acutely aware she would not get to Gloucester without its protection. At least she was nimble, a quick learner and looked the part. She would muddle through. Surprisingly the first casualty she was confronted with was a sharp cut on a girl’s hand. A paper cut! Anna could not believe it when told that a sheet of paper had caused the injury. Whatever next!

The days passed. Anna found her place in the hierarchy of an almost totally feminine  world. Over 16,000 sacks of mail were sorted and handled each day. The Army Postal Service was a major factor in the war effort. It offered morale support to those who read the letters and, of course, those who wrote the missives. The Front was only eighty miles away but eighty miles of little news. Newspapers were expensive and dated. There was no better way than to write, whether it was about love, a favourite dog, the farm, Grandad, or the passing of the next door neighbour; whatever. It was a tactile way, so easy, with the best post the world had.

The heavy bags of parcels and letters could lead to severe muscle strain, hernias and even miscarriage.  Fatigue and fainting struck time and again. Laughter and song helped the day along but with long dresses and fancy, encumbering sleeves getting in the way, it was hard to work quickly. Uncomfortable shoes and the uneven floors of a temporary building did not make life easier for the girls coping with repetitive work. Now and again bullying led to a fight, which led to crowd participation. This called for one or two of the men to mix in and part the rowdies. Anna patched up the bites and the nail scratches…and combed matted hair.

A Post Office job was a career for life in 1913. One of the largest organisations in the world the Royal Mail gave a security to those who were lucky enough to work for it. This was blown apart when the war came. 17,000 staff joined up immediately and many were not to return. So when it came to a grumble in the sorting shed canteen, “the best for the boys” was the answer!

Wonderfully, the nature and responsibility of the work shone through and the letters always got despatched. Air raid warnings, signalled by bugle, gave the girls a shiver of fear. It was impossible to shelter the crowd. They were instructed to get under the benches, should they hear a bomb drop, in case there was a second or a third from which to take cover!

Anna soon noticed a new spirit amongst the girls. With many of the postal men away women were taking their place in the world. Drivers, packers, even censors of letters seeking the leak of confidential matters, women filled the vacancies. A Women’s Auxiliary Police Service had been set up and was proving most reliable.

Curious things happened. The fat  girl, working on section 10, slipped into the surgery, to tell the amazed nurses who happened to be on duty,

“There’s a babby in the lavvy!”

“Sorry?” Anna felt her lack of English exposed.

“Just been to the lavatory and there’s a babby there.”

It was a surprise birth!

One girl collapsed. on being carried into the surgery to be laid on the inspection couch, she was found to be a young man! posing as a girl to avoid going to France! He almost lost what manhood he had in the outrage.

The food was at least regular. Anna often wondered what was inside, as she handled a squidgy parcel being sent to the Front. Who were giving their especial treats to some soldier sleeping in a rat run trench not so very far away? On her few hours off Anna wandered around the once beautiful gardens and stared at the magnificent houses. The one with the large conservatory was, she learnt, a hospital for the blind – Belgian blind soldiers. They were there! with bandages around their heads, hands pawing, groping and sticks a-tapping! With a gasp she realised that her friends the German Army had inflicted this to these young men, her age!  It had somehow seemed acceptable behind the trenches but here, amongst the elegant houses and the stately layout of the park, it laid seeds of doubt in her mind. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Resolve! Resolve! Her duty, Duty.

Once it was reported that two more spies had been shot in the old rifle range at the Tower of London a wave of “spy hunt” swept the country.  Anna kept her head down.

Chapter Thirty-one ~ Anna in London

“He drowned with the others!” She said twisting her mouth in sympathy, flapping her hands.

“We’ll have to photograph you,” he said.

Anna visibly paled! It was against all rules drummed into her!

“It’s not all that painful,” the old policeman grunted. “Wanted for your Alien’s Registration Card.”

She nodded dumbly.

“Your pal, the Guard on the Ambulance train, he told us to look out for you! ‘Washed out little thing,’ He told us. ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly’.”

The camera’s  light, a frightening flash of magnesium powder, brought instant memories of the shelling Anna had experienced.  She shivered and cowered, her hands flying up to cover her face.

“Sorry  about that!” muttered the photographer, emerging from beneath black drapes. “It  upsets the kids too!”

“Now! What we have to do is to find you a job. The Post Office Train people say that they are desperately short of nursing help at the sorting office at Regents Park in London. You’d best be there so we know where to find you to send on your Card when the photograph is ready! We’ll put you on the next PO train and they will look after you.”

Anna was sat down, with yet another cup of tea, in  the railway police office, to await the special train  expected to return from its long haul from Plymouth. There was not a lot she could do other than accept the situation  She felt lost and disorientated, a huge contrast to being on demand by the likes of a nursing Sister or an overworked Doctor.

The Star 4-6-0 locomotive at last pulled into Basingstoke. Steam and smoke, it was a massive presence pulling the wagons loaded with full sacks of mail, and the empties, a everlasting rotation of letters carrying every emotion capable of being put to paper. There was a  carriage laid out with a long table, and pigeon holes to receive letters, as a sorting office for those with high priority. Anna was bundled in to sit on an occasional seat under the watchful eye of the Supervisor. She waited with high degree, she had to admit to herself, for her first visit to London.

The route via Reading took short of two hours to draw into the gloom of Paddington’s great glass station, having been diverted by the threat of a Zeppelin attack to the south of London. The mail bags were quickly unloaded onto trolleys, with the priority consignment taken to a waiting horse drawn covered wagon.  Much to Anna’s surprise  it was driven by a young woman who indicated her to take a seat alongside, requiring Anna to climb up high to a tiny perch, thankfully with a guard rail on the outside, almost to the level of the canvas roof. How the girl took the reins with such confidence! She wheeled the horse around to trot up the ramp out of the station and, with whip raised, drew into the constant flow of carriage, cars and huge lorries. It was a show of true horsemanship …and courage. Perhaps the bright post office red helped give her some priority?

They trotted down Marylebone Road at a sharp pace. The driver indicated Madam Tussaud’s famous ‘Chamber of Horrors’ show on the left hand side. They entered Regents Park by Clarence Gate and were stopped by a khaki clad guard with a rifle slung from his shoulder. He waved them on with a grin. Not far from the Outer Circle they drove to unload alongside the wooden shedding that seemed to stretch endlessly across the park. They were expected. Helping hands quickly unloaded the full sacks marked with a red stencilled P onto wheeled trolleys and saw them rapidly disappear just as an obvious Senior  stepped over to greet Anna.

“I know who you are,” she growled. “Welcome to our small home! Two thousand five hundred girls, all sorting millions, maybe billions, of letters for the BEF! We have our fallouts, our hysterics,  our wornouts, our lovesmitten, all sorts! We need a nurse or two!”

The noise! The smell! The apparent chaos, the piles of sacks, full and empty, even  some, she was told, in a pile to be sent back to the prisons for restitching. Anna was shown to her Casualty room. She had  a base, a roof over her head and, supposedly, food!

Chapter Thirty ~ Anna and the Railway

Anna tried the door into the staff carriage to find it open. Luckily it was empty. She slipped in with the intention of a thorough wash and clean up. First, she hung her cloak on a dressmaker’s dolly and gave it good brush. Salt still hung in the heavy cloth. Afterwards, she washed her hair and had a good scrub. She ate some of the soft white bread, which seemed on offer, longing for a taste of black rye that was more to her taste. The heavy train, clicking at every joint in the rail, set up a pattern of noise that rang in her head as they passed through the beautiful, empty country. Was this a country at war? It was only passing wagons holding artillery pieces, their snouts pointing to heaven and longer wagons with horses, noses to tail, nose to tail, that convinced her that this was the enemy. At one point they drew into a siding to allow a fast troop train to rush by on a single line stretch where the ‘up’ track was being repaired. The gangers lifted their shovels and picks in salute to the Red Cross as they continued on their way. At last they drew into the southern branch line at Basingstoke, where ambulances waited to take the wounded to West Ham House and Danes Hill.

The guard moved her to the downside where there was no platform. As he handed her down the side of the van Anna slipped and fell. Her canvas bag dropped six feet to the granite chips ballasting the rail. She cursed in a string of Flemish, to the amazement of the railwayman, who found it difficult to realise that the world spoke in a different language to English. He gathered her up and told her to board the next train travelling west, indicating the way with a wave of his arm. It was a long wait and when it did arrive it was a goods train, each wagon guarded by a soldier armed with a rifle. Not her train she decided, slumping down onto a platform bench. The station stank of steam, oil, people and dust, old dust. Her cape collected all this a she huddled on the hard slats, trying to fall asleep as the station slowed down its ceaseless wartime activity.

The Great Central policeman’s hand fell on her shoulder. Dazed, Anna muttered,

“Goedenavond.”

The policeman gently responded by telling her that sleeping on the station platform was not allowed. Perhaps she should move to the Ladies’ Waiting room. Still full of sleep, she mumbled,

“Ik beginrijp net neit.”

`Got a right one here,` he thought and went to the office to gather a female assistant, if there was one at this time of night!

There was nobody. With the help of an elderly porter he walked the nurse to the empty room. The smell of urine pervaded and he wondered, eyeing the dirt, how it could possibly be called a Ladies’ Room. Anna stretched out on the thinly upholstered bench and settled down for the night.

This was not interrogation as she knew it! No bright lights, no intensity as she had been taught, just a comfortable elderly man with stripes on his arm kindly asking where she had come from and had she identification papers? Anna bent down to her canvas bag. No, it had not been searched, everything in its place and the papers, original service papers stretching back to a training in nursing since her teenage years, all taken from a girl that she had never known and, hopefully, was still alive.

Anna was quite prepared to answer questions arising from the now rather mouldy,  certainly creased sheets and was surprised to be asked,

“How did you get on the manifest of the Warilda?”

She puzzled over the word, then guessing, said that she had been delegated to care for a stretcher case.

Chapter Twenty-nine ~ Dafodil Days

Anna was nonplussed. So far everybody she had met in England was kind to her, yes, bossy when she appeared to interfere with their work, but not unkind or dominating. The  docks, the railway, the general demeanour was good-humoured, ribald even. A queer nation, lacking discipline and yet, surprisingly, working. Nobody  took  alarming  attention of her. They just accepted that,  as everybody else,  she had a job to do and was getting on with  it. The instructions drilled into her were to acclimatize herself for a day or two and then draw close to her target. She was not a spy, she had a different duty. Eliminate a traitor to her Country. Germany.

It had been drilled into her with obsession.

German spies travelling to England in the war had not been successes.  For a reason that the German espionage school could not understand, almost all if them  gave away their identity immediately yet they had been given the best of training, every variation in British character had been explained in detail, every nuance carefully rehearsed and studied. It was unexplainable. Once found they were shot. This was one reason why they’d chosen a girl.

Anna had no wish to link in with the refugees in Swindon. Belgium, a small country was divided into two fraternities. The Roman Catholics had their French connections, the Flemish speakers with their Protestant views had links with the Low Countries mostly to the north. Any meeting would  involve a quick recognition of area, even village, by intonation of voice. Woe betide she who tried to hide by a language differing from that of her birth. Surely some one would know of her family, even know them face to face. Maybe retribution for her family links with the hated Hun would be handed out in no uncertain manner. Swindon was on the way to Gloster, that Anna did recognise.

*******

Henry was pleased to hear the news from Newport Docks but anxious that not all the charges had detonated. There was evidence to be found by the diligent on any demolition of this size and complexity. He had hoped that the mining engineers would head up the aftermath of the explosions. Mining charges were strictly controlled, contained in a special security shed, listed, numbered and checked out. Handled with care at every stage. When brought to the coal or rock face they were in the hands of the shot putter. An exact responsibility to drill the charge hole at correct depth and angle. It was dangerous work when a misfire happened. A live charge, in a hole, in a very confined place!

Had any dud charge ever found its way into a wagon of found coal? It was not to be. Explosive experts were called in. They had recent experience on the Western  Front where Welsh miners were digging tunnels under the German lines and coming across the Hun tunnels complete with booby traps and explosive charges. Thankful to be called back from one of the worst of War jobs they were diligent in their search. Every full wagon on the docks, every hopper of coal, every collier, recently refueled, was suspect. Royal Navy ratings from Portsmouth and Plymouth were set to search almost each lump of coal … and its accompanying pile of coal dust.

Chapter Twenty-seven ~ A Blessing in Disguise

To the British public, memories and tales of war had typically invoked regiments of Redcoats or brave Dragoons fighting in distant lands for great causes. The Boer war brought reality nearer but now war was being graphically described just across the Channel, in Belgium ! the place of beer and chocolates.  The country was outraged and the story of  German cruelty was on every lip.

Almost before the British Declaration of War the country was howling with rage. The small British Army was mobilised and on Belgian soil. With professional exactitude it was formed up as the BEF. The British Expeditionary Force  and was quickly supporting the French on their northern flank.  The Germans were amazed at the speed of the British action. They were also  surprised at their fire power,  shown with the Tommies’ use of the Lee Enfield .303 rifle.  They did an efficient job of rapid  fire that almost resembled machine guns in use. They had held back the Germans at Mons, the first major battle of a truly bloody war. And retreated. It was no wonder that Belgian refugees were welcomed in Britain.

Anna left her charge at the insistence of the QAIMNS who demanded she left the train. She gathered herself but panicked at the though of being returned to France on the next Hospital ship. She was at a loss. As she walked through the carriage she was surprised to hear German being muttered by a few cases! There were several of them on board! Would it help if  she told the Nursing Sister she understood and could speak German? No! This would lead to too many questions! As she climbed down on to the track she discovered there was no platform. She found herself being helped by a uniformed railway man. He asked which nursing body she served?

“Belgian,” she sparked!

Anna was told by him that she had no rights to be on board so she hid behind his authority as they walked the length of the  fourteen carriages. He told her proudly that they were converted at the GWR works Swindon: six for the stretcher cases, one for the sitting and standing, the pharmacy and operating theatre with two first class carriages converted for staff accommodation and the brake end van. The Guard, for that who he was, told her Swindon Town had given thirty empty houses for the three hundred and fifty Belgian refugees in need and that he would get her there! He handed her into the Brake Van and promised to direct her onto a train leaving Basingstoke. It was their next stop.

********

The aeroplane Henry had seen on occasion  flying over the vale of Gloster was a Nieuport 17bis, one of the neatest fighting over the Western Front, for a time the envy of the German Deutche Luftstreistkraft.  Towed on its own wheels behind a lorry from the Sunningend Works near Cheltenham, with a pub stop at the Oddfellows Inn to cool its bearings, the plan was to fly from Huccolcote in a wide testing curve before being sent to an airfield way behind the trenches in France.

It was Arthur Martyn of HH Martyn and Hugh Borroughes of Airco who had driven over to see for themselves the damage the fire had done. It had destroyed the stock of Sitka spruce at Gloster Docks. This seemed a disaster as they built the Nieuport and Farmans with wood. With great speed. Forty-five aircraft a week had been leaving the works. What were they to do now?

The Wright Brothers had used aluminium incorporating it in their flying machines. It was the lightest metal known and when alloyed it proved surprisingly strong. Their coppersmiths and tinsmiths excelled and quickly were called upon to form cowlings, fairings and wing tips. John Bevines Moisant had flown his aluminium ‘plane, complete with Albert Filenx and his cat, Madamoiselle Felix, across the Channel in 1910. Herr Hugo Junkers in Germany had been  experimenting too! He built a sheet metal glider that flew, or rather glid, and was followed by the J7  constructed from aluminium alloy that flew from Udershot airfield.

Out of disaster came development.  The Martyn engineers knew much about metal with foundries casting brass, aluminium and bronze, forming sheet brass and stretching metal until the molecular structure flowed as the designer wished. Little did Henry know that, indirectly by burning all that wood, he accelerated the unbelievable:  aircraft made from metal. Interestingly all the aircraft wings fabricated by Martyns were dope-covered from the development of Coleford acetone. Henry would have been fascinated had he but known it.

Chapter Twenty-six ~ The Hospital Train

Southampton Port Authority,  advised of the sinking, made preparations for the emergency and instructed the hospital train to pull up on the train ferry pier. It had long carriages, each with the triple banks of bunks, and a galley with a small boiler area. This had a fifty gallon hot water facility alongside a tiled out operating  unit. It was all pulled by a LSWR locomotive, with a second engine to push it if the full load was too great.  As all involved assembled on the train ferry pier the QAIMNS nurses took advantage of the empty bunks and took a quick nap before the arrival of the rescue flotilla, expected around dawn.

The first to steam up Southampton Water was the destroyer. There was precious little room for stretchers on the decks of the slim hulled fighting ship. The ‘Ups’ had wedged into every corner, supporting themselves by every means possible as the vessel, rolling around in the increasing grip of an incoming tide ripping up the Channel, shot away from the sinking Warilda.

Anna was on one of the trawlers keeping an eye on stretcher cases. Some needed yet more morphia, others were happy to think they would be shortly on their way home. All were grateful with some attention, were it even a smile. It was a more sedate journey and with nearly forty miles to cover, some did not make it.

The RN seamen eyed the tide rip waters for a sign of  a periscope of a submarine towing through the wavelets. They ever-feared  the horns and curved black body of a mine. There was one amongst them who had the skill to shoot out a horned detonator and explode the thing before it destroyed the boat and all on board.

The forts set in mid-channel in the approaches of the Solent winked their Aldis lamps in acknowledgement as did the guardhouse next to the flying-boat sheds at Fawley. They passed the new hospital at Netley, glistening in its smart brick and dominated by the chapel tower. The pier, built to enable ships to unload their wounded close to the building was not a success, the foreshore was far to shallow to reach deep water far to far out in the main channel of Southampton Water. Along the shoreline the lonely, empty houseboats of the pre-war years rocked gently on the incoming tide. The glorious sights of the great yachts, the elegant crowds strolling the length of the promenade was but a distant dream of long-forgotten years. War had reduced the scene to semi-dereliction.

Unloading was supervised by the RAMC. The crew members of the Warilida were relieved of any duty and rested in the railway departure shed. QAIMNS nurses saw to it that the stretcher-wounded were placed in the trains, the most needy near to the small operating theatre. Lifting up the stretchers to the top bunk of the tiers of three was a venture best forgotten! Anna attached  herself to the care of the grievously wounded and spoke Flemish, rapidly, to a QA who goggled at her and tried to move her on, and out of the train. They all recognised Anna’s worn-out uniform but the QAIMNS ruled the roost and were reluctant put up with this brown clad Belgian girl with strange eyes.

England, in 1914, had accepted the largest influx of refugees it had ever experienced. 240,000 Belgians had flooded in, fearing the onslaught of the Huns. The Great War, started by a pistol shot in a remote corner of Europe,  flared up with retribution, revenge and opportunity, with all playing their part. It had hit home hard when Germany crashed in to neutral Belgium with all the weight of a band of thugs. The small country was, from the Army’s point of view, a short cut to France, and Germans, with the memory of the 1850 war lost command control, thought it  good to punish the Roman Catholics! Though it was not a religious attack, the fervor added a bit of spice and helped to pull the place apart. Britain rose up in horror as the facts and eye-witness reports flooded in, overwhelmingly.