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WW1 Medical Memoirs And Diaries
Some of the officers of the 9th Field Ambulance. Major Fraser is in the centre
The Guards attacked from the right side of Ginchy along the crest of a low ridge to the right of Delville Wood - a front of a little less than a mile. They were supposed to take Les Boeufs.
From the trench where the bearers were waiting the ground sloped up, about as steeply as Katoomba Street, for about 400 yards to the crest of the ridge. As soon as our attack had gone through the German front line the Germans laid down a tremendous barrage along the crest At 8 o'clock Frazer told me to take eight squads of bearers and see how we got on - bearers were four to a stretcher and that was a squad.
The crest was still pretty black with bursting shells, so as we approached it I spread the men out in a thin line, When we were nearly through the barrage just to my left was the top half of a man's body, cut off at the waist, tossed 30 or 40 feet into the air, with his arms spread wide, spinning like a Catherine wheel. I must have been in a queer emotional state for I burst out laughing at the grotesque and ghastly sight.
The bearers had been told that if there were casualties among them they would have to carry with two to a stretcher instead of four; anyhow it would not be a long carry as they would not go far before finding a load for their stretcher. When they were on their way back it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to go on and find out how far the attack had gone. I had a bag of first field dressings with me of a supply of morphine tablets so, as I found a wounded man, I would fix him up as well as possible, give him half a grain of morphine under his tongue (that would soon make him drowsy and ease his pain) and tell him that stretcher bearers would be along soon.
The division had advanced about a mile, with the new front line a few hundred yards short of Les Boeufs. which they had expected to capture, but the attack on our right had been held up at the Quadrilateral so our right flank was quite up in the air, with a gap about a mile wide between it and the next division. Alexander had got his company through Les Boeufs, but realising what had happened on the right had got them back again before they were cut off so now there was the front line just a little short of the final objective. Of course to do the work of clearing it had been necessary to find out just where the front line was. The carrying was over a mile of ground so torn up by the guns that there was not a square foot of firm ground, one shell hole on top of another.
During the autumn and winter of '16-'17 we had first rain with the most appalling mud, and then a frost which lasted several weeks and froze the ground to a depth of 18 inches. Of course, the frost made it much easier to get about, but it made shelling more unpleasant, as the shells detonated the moment they landed on the iron-hard ground, scattering their fragment much more widely, On the whole it was much preferable to the mud, two stories of which will illustrate it's horrors. A CO. of one of the Guards battalions weighed the great coat of one of the men when they came out of the trenches - it weighed 80 lbs. The other story is that a man who wandered off the duckboards into a shell hole filled with mud like a thick porridge. His mates tried to pull him out but could not; then they tried to dig him out, but the mud flowed back as fast as they shoveled it away; at last a mule was brought up along the duckboards, a rope passed under the man' s shoulders, and he was hauled out, sadly wracking his spine. These stories came to me second hand, but I believe them.
Some time in the spring of 1917 the division, after a short rest, took over from an Australian division, in front of Delville Wood. I was sent ahead, with theTransport to take over the dressing station and then move on to the ADS. The congestion on the road was fearful - traffic moved on for a few yards and then stopped for anything up to a quarter of an hour before moving for another few yards. At the rate we were going it would be hours after the given time before we reached the Dressing Station, and I had just decided that I would have to leave the transport and go along on foot with some stretcher bearers and skeleton equipment when Frazer walked up; he looked at his watch and then at me and said "I didn't expect to find you here, Dark." It was no use saying that I had been on the point of getting along; it would have sounded like a weak excuse, so the rebuke had to be taken in silence. From Frazer that amounted to a severe reprimand, and made me feel very glum.
Malaria avoided me, although each of the other officers had two or more attacks during the summer of 1918. As the war was petering out we became very bored, so bored that when the news of the armistice came it didn't raise a ripple of excitement. I was playing bridge when someone called from the telephone "They have signed the Armistice." My partner said "Really; two spades."
All our patients were Serbians as we were attached to the Serbian army; most of them
suffered from several attacks of malaria and dysentery, plus their wounds, so were in a very debilitated state, and were terribly vulnerable to the Spanish Influenza when came along. Of those attacked 50% died. I saw a good many of the post mortemed lungs, riddled with cavities, some about as big as a golf ball, half filled with pus and disintegrated lung. It was amazing that they had lived so long.
Soon after the Armistice our surgical specialist was transferred, and for a few months I was in charge of the surgical division of 520 beds, but without increase in rank, or pay. Apart from watching influenza patients die, most of the work was doing amputations or re-amputations where the previous operator had left a badly designed stump. I became quite expert, but unfortunately the ability to amputate a thigh does not help much in private practice, The really important part of the operation is in judging how much muscle to leave as a cushion at the end of the bone. Most of the re-operations had to be done because the end of the bone was pressing directly on the skin.
I got back to Australia early in July, 1919, four years and four months after first leaving it.
http://www.vlib.us/medical/dark/dark.htm
Chapter and verse: The surprising story of the song 'Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag' - Features, Music - The Independent
"Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile,
While you've a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that's the style.
What's the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile."
So runs the chorus line of one of the two great marching songs (along with It's a Long Way to Tipperary) of the First World War. And indeed able to afford a smile, or three, is Aubrey Powell, the grandson of Felix Powell, its composer. This Armistice Day at the Cenotaph, as the band strikes up Pack Up Your Troubles, more pennies will drop into Powell's bank account, thanks to his grandfather's foresight in retaining the rights to his tune.
In fact it has been a good year for Aubrey – what with the worldwide Dell computer adverts that samples his grandfather's ditty, as well as R&B singer Eliza Doolittle's hit single, Pack Up. "It pays for a few dinners", he says.
Pack Up Your Troubles is a culturally durable, as well as lucrative, song, transcending its Edwardian music-hall roots to live on in movie titles (including Laurel and Hardy's 1932 comedy of the same name), pop songs (by Richard Thompson and Eliza Doolittle among others), and even children's TV shows like Rugrats. One commentator has included it, along with Rock Around the Clock, My Way and Dancing Queen as one of the "songs that defined a century".
"What amazes me is that the song was written in 1915 and here we are, 95 years later, and it has become even more part of the English language than it was before", says Powell, who lives in London when he is not touring the world in his role as a film and rock concert director. "I remember watching TV at the time of the Wayne Rooney sex scandal. I was watching the news with Rooney going off to play Switzerland, and the newsreader saying, 'There's Wayne Rooney, packing up his troubles in his old kit bag.
