He always had a smile and went out of his way to make things as comfortable as possible for the girls, which helped to put them all at ease.
If they thought that leg of the journey was bad, the drive into the hills after a two-day stopover in Cox’s Bazar was terrifying. They spent several hours driving on what were little more than jungle tracks before they reached the CCS. Once the group had settled in to the tented accommodation that would be home for several weeks a very welcome late evening meal was served.
‘I thought we would at least have our own tents,’ said Madge. ‘But I suppose it’s quite nice to be back together again under one roof. Even if it is only canvas!’
The nurses were all so dog-tired when they eventually got into their camp beds that they slept like logs, but they got a big surprise when they woke just before dawn. There had been another heavy and prolonged rainstorm during the night and a bubbling, gurgling stream was flowing right through the middle of their tent!
‘Oh look, we have running water!’ joked Madge.
Luckily, due to the tarantulas, poisonous spiders, leaches and other creepy crawlies that were inclined to pop into the CCS tents, the camp beds were high off the ground so nothing of importance was damaged.
Later that morning their tent was moved away from the stream that was still happily flowing from a crevice further up the hill. What really surprised the newly arrived group of VADs was the size of the camp that was camouflaged and neatly tucked away at the bottom of a lush green valley. Birds fluttered in and out of the trees that grew on the slopes and pretty little flowers sprouted alongside thick, spiked bushes that surrounded the camp.
A main tent acted as an operating theatre and makeshift casualty ward, and then there was a kitchen, a separate toilet and a makeshift shower hidden behind a tarpaulin that the soldiers had rigged up. That was about it, so far as Madge could see. She was told that there were always troops on guard, but those boys must have slept elsewhere because there were no more tents in sight.
The staff at the camp more than welcomed the young nurses because the first thing that Phyl did when she saw the kitchen facilities and sacks of potatoes was to teach the cooks how to make ‘very passable’ chips.
Wisps of mist rose as the morning sun broke through to turn the valley into a scene of such beauty that it came as quite a shock when the peace was shattered by the rumble of thunder.
‘Does this thunder mean we’re in for another of those heavy downpours?’ Madge asked a guard after another loud and prolonged burst.
He shook his head and smiled gently. ‘That noise wasn’t thunder, miss. It’s our artillery giving the Japanese their early morning wake-up call,’ he said.
That will teach you to ask silly questions, Madge said to herself, and try as she might, she found it difficult to balance the Arakan’s forested glory with the utter brutality that was taking place just a few miles away.
Madge had spent the early part of the day in the operating theatre, where it had been a surprisingly quiet start. Most of the ‘repair work’ took place on men who had been brought in overnight with shrapnel damage suffered in a twilight confrontation with a Japanese raiding party. Casualty clearing meant exactly what it said. Doctors had to decide whether the injured soldiers could be patched up and returned to their units, or if they needed specialised treatment, in which case they would then be stretchered to the nearest air strip and flown to Chittagong or Calcutta. Only rarely did wounded troops stay for more than a couple of days and if that did happen, it was usually to get them fit enough to travel on to more sophisticated medical facilities. Thankfully, there was no shortage of medicine at this stage of the war because everything was supplied by air. The team were free to carry out blood transfusions, minor operations, stitch wounds and treat soldiers for everything from malaria to typhoid as well as dysentery and beriberi. They even had to sort out one poor young lad who had been bitten by a snake.
His pal who had brought him in to the station kept on teasing him that he was going to die in minutes.
‘Just you leave him alone,’ Madge said jokingly, aware that in a bizarre way his friend was trying to keep his spirits up. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, turning to the lad who had been bitten, ‘it wasn’t one of those really poisonous ones they have around here so I’d say you’re actually pretty lucky. You’ll be fine in no time.’
The state of some of the boys when they first came in was often very worrying because they arrived with literally nothing and Madge had to clean the soldiers up, find out what the injury was and get them to theatre as quickly as possible. As warned, the nurses worked round the clock until they were told to get some sleep. It wasn’t unusual to be called to deal with the wounded at 3 a.m. and no matter how badly injured or sick they were there was always a ‘thank you’ after dressing even the nastiest of injuries.
After one particularly gruelling day at the CCS, as she tucked herself up in her rather uncomfortable camp bed, Madge thought to herself, It really is a case of all work and no play here. They weren’t wrong when they told us to expect to have to work our socks off. There was the odd moment of fun and teasing at meal times, but there was not even the hint of a social life. When they weren’t nursing the girls
