One of the least publicized of all Army services is the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps, which has given more than 100 years of dedicated work to caring for Australian servicemen in times of war and its aftermath. The history of the Corps dates back to 1898 when a small nursing service was formed in Sydney. It consisted of one Lady Superintendent and twenty-four nurses. The first actual service of nurses with Australian troops was during the Boer War (1898-1903). When war broke out in 1914, the Australian Government raised the first Australian Imperial Force for overseas service. The nurses to staff the medical units, which formed an integral part of the AIF, were recruited from the Australian Army Nursing Service Reserve and from the civil nursing profession. Senior officers were more inclined to have trained male soldiers in preference to female nurses. Major General Howse, Director of Medical Services, has been quoted as saying that ‘the female nurse — as a substitute for the fully trained male nursing orderly — did little toward the actual saving of life in war … although she might promote a more rapid and complete recovery’. General Howse was speaking at a time when the contribution of the Nursing Service to the treatment of the wounded soldiers, at an early stage, had yet to be recognized by the Australian authorities. http://www.anzacday.org.au/history/ww1/anecdotes/casualty.html Lulu has nursing staff photos .... maybe you'll find your nurse here ..... http://www.ww1photos.com/NursingStaff.html
The British nurses too ... they weren't wanted by the "powers that be " but they were superb .... and nursed many many wounded soldiers and even died with them ....... nurses from all nations did their part .... !! At first British authorities try to keep women off World War One battlefields, but they ignored the government and kept on coming, thousands of them, often under their own steam. The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs), the Scottish Women, and over 2,5000 Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) travel to Europe. Undeterred by blasts of artillery shells and the ruined landscape of trenches, barbed wire and mud, they set about saving men. Running a gauntlet of shellfire outside Brussels, Elsie Knocker (later Baroness T’Serclaes) and 18-year old Mari Chisholm drag wounded Brits to their automobile-turned-ambulance, give them first-aid, and drive them to a base hospital 15 miles away. Thirty-year-old nurse Kate Carruthers, stationed on the Western Front in 1917, is working in her field hospital when it comes under attack, and she is wounded. Ignoring her pain, she continues treating injured men, and displays such bravery in the face of the enemy that she is later awarded the Military Medal created by King George V. http://www.britsattheirbest.com/heroes_adventurers/h_ww1_women.htm
The more than 25,000 US women who served in Europe in World War I did so on an entrepreneurial basis, especially before 1917. They helped nurse the wounded, provide food and other supplies to the military, serve as telephone operators (the “Hello Girls”), entertain troops, and work as journalists. Many of these “self-selected adventurous women … found their own work, improvised their own tools … argued, persuaded, and scrounged for supplies. They created new organizations where none had existed.” Despite hardships, the women had “fun” and “were glad they went.” Women sent out to “canteen” for the US Army – providing entertainment, sewing on buttons, handing out cigarettes and sweets – were “virtuous women” sent to “keep the boys straight.” Army efforts to keep women to the rear proved difficult. “Women kept ignoring orders to leave the troops they were looking after, and bobbing up again after they had been sent to the rear.” Some of the US women became “horrifyingly bloodthirsty” in response to atrocity stories and exposure to the effects of combat. Looking back, the American women exhibited “contradictory feelings” of sadness about the war, horror at what they had seen, and pride in their own work. Mary Borden, a Baltimore millionaire who set up a hospital unit at the front from 1914 to 1918, wrote: “Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back again. You send your socks … again and again just as many times as they will stand it. And then you throw them away. And we send our men to the war again and again … just until they are dead.” http://www.warandgender.com/wgwomwwi.htm
