A Nurse at the Front

From the Cleckheaton Guardian, 13th November 1914. 

MISS WINIFRED EVERS AT THE FRONT.

By the kindness of the Vicar of Liversedge we are enabled to give the following extracts from a letter from his sister, Nurse Winifred Evers, who is on Red Cross duty at the front:

“I wish you could see me now in my little bell tent.  It has never ceased to rain all last night and all to-day.  Water is coming in all round; nothing is on the floor that I can put on my bed or chair, otherwise it gets wet; and there is a steady trickle across the floor.  I sit on my camp bed.  I’ve got the tent to myself, as my companion is on night duty….

One poor boy I was nursing died, I grieve to say, only 20 years old.  His people seem so nice, I have had splendid letters from them.  It is sad to see these young lives go….

The bugle calls are all so pretty.  The first goes at 5.30 a.m., and then after that for meals, etc., and for letters, the one we love to hear…..

It is bitterly cold here.  I love my jersey.  I have a nightly pilgrimage up the field after our evening meal for hot water – right to the other end of the field to my tent boiler….

All our letters are censored by the Matron, so it entirely prohibits our writing much of what we would…

We hope to be moved when it is safe, so that the men will not have so far to travel.  I have been busy all day in the surgical tent, and have dressed forty wounds – bullet wounds through the arms, legs, and back.  We have some such sad cases.  Last Sunday a poor boy of nineteen died in my tent.  He had his leg amputated. I wrote to his mother as I promised him I would do, and told her all about him.”

[This is the complete set of extracts as published in the paper.]