Trip from Trinidad - 5 More of Mairi's tale of her experiences in the First World War

Margaret contined her story about her daughter's time in Belgium during the war.

"Already it was beginning to be apparent that there was a fatal lack of organisation in the ambulance corps. The men part of it were rushing hither and thither bravely enough, but in a most haphazard manner, wasting much precious petrol; and even joy rides were not unknown, whereas much real ability was going to waste.

"The waiting time was a time of great strain. ”We mooched about” said Mairi miserably, “I felt bored with life. Another day of waiting. One must have patience beyond everything.”

"Then there swam into their ken the gay and gallant figure of a young Belgian officer; he was slim and tall with fair hair showing up his well fitting down green uniform. They nicknamed him Gilbert the Filbert, he had account for 48 Germans in the weeks proceeding, so his presence was inspiring. He was to be very closely associated with them in their work, but at the time he was merely a passerby."

“Is he the one Elsie married?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“You’ll know when I get to that part of the story,” said Margaret, with a laugh.

"Their work began when they met the trainloads of wounded at the station. “There was a dramatic moment when a trainload of terribly smashed and maimed Belgians came in at one platform of the station just as a trainload of self confident clean fresh British Tommies was going out from another. The little Belgians had not as yet seen such assurances of help, and one and all, exhausted and faint as they were, cheered and waved their poor bandaged hands.

"Elsie was sent out in one of the ambulances to the Front fifteen miles away and had her first glimpse of a country at war. She collected fifteen wounded soldiers from a convent, the area was abandoned and filled with burnt-out ruins, roads were choked with refugees wandering along the road in huddles with their children. “It is all so sad and pathetic,” she said.

"Back in Ghent Mairi was kicking her heels, itching to get behind the wheel of an ambulance, any vehicle. Her first sight of the war was a German car that had been captured, its radiator riddled with bullets, the interior was covered in blood and there were many bloody rags on the ground.

"For the next few days Mairi, Elsie, Helen Gleason and ‘Dot’ Fielding helped feed the eight thousand refugees that were crammed into the Palais des Fetes. When that was done Elsie and Mairi would go to the wards and practise their French by ragging with the wounded soldiers. Mairi said, “They were very cheery and like to see us very much” whereas the more worldly-wise Elsie enjoyed the flirting, realising that it was most unprofessional but the soldiers loved it.

"On the 30th of September Elsie spotted the handsome Belgian officer for a second time and had coffee with him before he went back to the Front. She said he was so kind and considerate and she knew she was falling in love with him. She even went as far as to say he might possibly be a new father for her seven-year-old son Kenneth.

"From the 1st of October Elsie had drinks and meals with the 'gay and gallant' Belgian officer whom she worried about falling in love with. His real name was George Suetens, a member of the Voluntary Motorcycle Corps. His role was to go out on his motorbike at night and shoot as many Germans as he could.

"Elsie and ‘Gilbert’ would have drinks and meals with the other members of the Corps but sneaked off for romantic encounters on their own. To be given the moniker ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ suggests that George was a snappy dresser: the work ‘knut’ is army slang for officers who were so smartly dressed they were almost dandified; and filberts are small nuts. There was a feeling that their new friend was perhaps vain and a bit of a ladies’man.

"So to answer the question from before, “No, he wasn’t the one she married in the end.

"The shortage of petrol meant that sometimes the Corps was unable to make many trips to the battlefields to bring in the wounded and they would hang around Ghent.  They bought postcards (and sent one to me, added Margaret) and souvenirs, and played rounders with the lightly-wounded soldiers and orderlies in the backyard of the hospital. But on the 3rd of October news came that a train full of badly-hurt Belgian soldiers was due to arrive from Antwerp where the Germans had inflicted heavy casualties. The survivors were in a shocking state and this was Mairi’s first encounter with serious battle-field casualties. She was upset at the sight of a badly-burned young man, perhaps the same age as her brother Hector, whose face was completely smashed up.

"Elsie and Mairi and the others were dealing with the casualties and ferrying them to the hospital until three o’clock in the morning and were up again at half-past-five to deal with the eight or nine hundred more victims that arrived from Antwerp that day.

"After two nights of almost no sleep, on the 5th of October Elsie heard that Gilbert has had a ‘smash’ on his motorbike and she and Mairi rushed out to look for him and found his wrecked machine in a motorcycle shop in the town and heard that he was not badly hurt.

"They were scrambled to go out in different teams to Zele and Berlaare, towns twelve miles to the east and south east of Ghent. Elsie was in Berlaare during a bombardment and then went on to Appels where they left the car by the side of the road and walked four miles over meadows to the trenches by the river Schelde, on the other side of which were the Germans. Elsie, Dot and Munro found two seriously-wounded Belgians, a major, and a private who had been shot in the back and had his foot blown off. It began to rain, making it a ‘terrible journey’ having ‘to sneak back in the dark and under fire with two men so bad.’ One of the drivers, Tom Worsfold, who had stayed with the ambulance, had been under fire since they left. Berlaare was on fire, (where Mairi was with other members of the Corps) ‘making a great glow in the sky.’ It was a cold, bumpy and weary ride home, trying to make the two men comfortable, the major survived his wounds but the young soldier would die in the hospital after an operation.

"Mairi’s night was no less hair-raising. Driven by Bert Bloxham, she was sent out with Doctors Reese and Shaw and their driver Eustace Gurney to Zele. This was her first experience of being in the danger zone, very close to the enemy forces. All her senses were fully engaged, she saw hundreds of troops trudging along the road and the sound of German guns filled the air. They walked through the trenches at Berlaare looking for any wounded they could take to Ghent. It was pitch dark and they came across the Belgians building up the trenches in complete silence. Mairi was only a hundred yards from the front line when they found a badly-injured man whom she helped carry on a stretcher.

"It was about this time," said Margaret,  "I told Roderick that he must go over and see for himself how things were and if he could, to bring Mairi home. He caught a boat to Ostend, hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to ‘The Front’.

"Now, it must be said that Roderick arrived with an unhelpful opinion of Elsie, whom he had met only once, but feared had a powerful influence over Mairi. He even described her as ' a very mad woman who is very changeable, and Mairi is rather chameleon-like.'

“Mairi showed him the sights of Ghent and caught up with family news and his forthcoming visit to Trinidad. Despite the Atlantic being haunted by German submarines and battleships, her father had booked a first-class passage on the fourth of November on the S.S Magdalena. It was typical of him to be undaunted by danger, if he wanted to go there he would.

“That evening Elsie had dinner with Mairi and her father and told them the lurid details of the aftermath of a massacre she had seen at Nazareth, a village uncomfortably close to the centre of Ghent. Three hundred Germans had taken twenty-six military Belgian military policemen by surprise and shot them at close range with dum-dum bullets and then ‘bashed’ their heads in. Elsie had been horrified. “The Germans are truly brutes to mutilate them after death,” she said.

“The next day Mairi and Dot drove Roderick out to Zele again and gave emergency first-aid where they could, and they left him there and returned to Ghent with eight wounded soldiers.

“Mairi wrote that it was pretty hot for a time as some bullets whizzed over the ambulance’. When they went back to Zele her father was nowhere to be found, and as the Germans were advancing they had to dash back to Ghent as fast as they could. Mairi had no time to worry where her father was when she was sent to Lokeren, eleven miles to the north-east, to take as many wounded as they could to the hospital in Ghent as fast as possible.

“Back at Ghent they found Roderick had hitched a ride home. Meanwhile, Elsie heard that an attack was planned on Nazareth that day so she and one of the doctors took an ambulance and sat by the road. Nothing happened and they ‘fooled around taking silly photographs before going home.( Mairi and Elsie pictured above)  The sight of the Belgian troops in full retreat must have filled them with dread. Roderick checked out of the Flandria Hotel and came back home. As he was leaving he told Mairi, ‘If it weren’t for your mother I’d stay out here with you. You’re having the most wonderful time, I wouldn’t take you back for anything.’ You can imagine how that made me feel.

"As soon as he got back to the family home in Dorset, Roderick wrote a letter to his sister Lucy describing his time in Belgium. He said that Mairi was looking fit and being most sensible. Dr Munro had told him she had been a great help and had a remarkably clear head and enormous strength.' Fortunately Mairi had overcome her squeamishness about blood and sights, of which her father was very proud. He had had the time of his life and lots of adventures– which may have gone some way to assuage his disappointment at being rejected by the War Office on account of his age in the early days of the war.

"Elsie’s romance with Gilbert was taking place in the highly-charged atmosphere of war. She met him, in secret of course, whenever she could for teas and coffees, lunches and dinners, anxious about where he was and if he was safe and a sense of relief and calm when he returned."

I asked Margaret what this Doctor Munro was like, and she said, “Elsie describes him as 'a likeable man and a brilliant impresario wonderfully vague in matters of detail and in appearance the very essence of the absent-minded professor'. And May Sinclair, the recruit who was supposedly having an affair with him, called him 'not only a psychologist and psychotherapist. but a psychic and he has the psychic's uncanny power over certain people (they are generally women).' His invitation to her over an intimate dinner at her house to come to Belgium with him clearly flattered her and made her feel that he really wanted her company. But his motives were most likely primarily economic. Since the corps was unable to secure official backing until the last minute. they were in serious need of money. and all four women recruits paid her own way (Mairi sold her motorbike to raise funds.) Munro knew that Miss Sinclair had invested the considerable sum £500 in his clinic. He knew that she had money he knew also that she was sympathetic to the idea of women's rights and had written articles and a pamphlet in support of the suffrage movement. He must have imagined that she would be keen to support a feminist venture not to mention the added incentives of her own excitement about the war and her prior connection with him through the clinic. If he could convince her to come to Belgium with him she would be even more likely to give the unit substantial financial support.”

“But you said it was mostly Mairi and Elsie who were talked about in the press. What happened to Miss Sinclair and the other two women?” I asked.

"Apparently, Lady Dorothea Fielding showed utter dauntlessness with which she would run her automobile over the battlefield picking up the wounded while the shrapnel sill spattered and the shells were still busting here and there.

“It was unclear even to May Sinclair exactly what her role in the corps would be. She was a sort of Secretary for a few hours a day in the beginning and wrote up the notes of what happened each day and kept the accounts. Mairi said that during her brief time there, she spent much of her time unpacking and packing Munro's bags.

"Mairi seemed to think that May Sinclair was frustrated with her tasks. Keeping the corps accounts took 1 1/2 hour even with Belgian and English money mixed, and she added everything up 10 times to make sure it is right, and she wrote in the daybook, with a record of events which would take perhaps half an hour. The commandant’s correspondence, reporting to the British Red Cross Society another half hour.

"On Oct 1 May Sinclair was told she would no longer work at the Palais des Fetes in case she introduced infections into the Military hospital there. Instead she was put in charge of replacing the soiled linens in the ambulances. She went out once with a correspondant, and Dr, Munro grudgingly included her in an ambulance trip on 8 Oct. In a small village near Likere she went with 12 Belgian stretcher bearers to bring back an injured man from one of the outlying houses. When the stretch-bearers put down the stretch to rest, She impatiently grasped the poles of the stretcher herself. Knowing that she could never carry it, the bearers wearily took up their burden once more, and she followed them back to the ambulance where she watched Munro dress the Soldier’s wound.

"The following day she went with a new ambulance. In Melle she watched while five wounded men were treated and loaded into the ambulance. The village was not shelled while she was in it.

"On Octr 10 Dr. Munro intended to take her with them back to Melle, but Elsie having the advantage in weight, height muscle and position, got up and tried to push her off the step. As she did she said, “You can’t come. You’ll take up the place of a wounded man.”

"So far May had been out three times but had never been in any danger or taken any central role in the rescue of the dying men. The following night she felt inept as she struggled to take care of a wounded British soldier in the hospital in Ghent. She was unable to lift him, she disturbed him with her continual, coughing, she annoyed the doctors and nurses by summoning them continually, so the next morning she was removed from the case. May's career as a nurse was over."