Madge was shocked early one afternoon, about halfway through their six-week stint at the CCS, when she heard two explosions that seemed alarmingly close. There was no way of finding out what was happening because she was in the middle of treating a soldier who had been shot in the thigh. An hour later she looked out of the tent to see two of the guards being cheered as they walked up the valley with several big, fat, juicy fish. They had thrown grenades into a deep stream in the next valley. She couldn’t believe the size of the haul!
‘One of our nurses has taught the boys in the kitchens how to make chips,’ she told the wounded soldier, who could see the guards through the flaps of the tent. ‘It looks to me as if there could be a treat on the menu,’ she added. ‘Good old-fashioned English fish and chips!’ That seemed to bring a smile to the soldier’s face despite the pain he must have been in.
The troops, out of gratitude for what the nurses were doing for them, told the girls they would be first in the queue for dinner that night before the inevitable blizzard of requests for the delicacy flew in. Madge and every other nurse, however, turned down the offer of fish and chips deep in the Burmese jungle that night so wounded troops could enjoy a little treat that would remind them of home.
The following morning, instead of the usual thunderous Allied artillery there was prolonged small-arms fire. It was a sign that the fighting was closer but Madge and Vera had no time to think about what was happening around them. They were kept busy dressing wounds of men who had been brought in at dawn on makeshift stretchers which had been hacked into shape from boughs that had fallen from trees. Two others had carved themselves such ornate walking sticks they took them back to the front line with them after their bullet wounds were patched up. The noise subsided around noon and the majority of the walking wounded had been treated and wasted no time in bravely returning to the conflict.
It meant the CCS was virtually deserted for the first time since the VAD contingent’s arrival.
‘The silence here is almost spooky,’ Vera said when she joined Madge for some lunch after having been on duty with her from first light that morning. ‘I don’t think we’ve even had a moment’s peace before now, and then this!’
‘No,’ said Madge. ‘I can’t get used to it either. It feels very strange.’
Phyl had overheard the girls talking and arrived at the table with her lunch. ‘Well, girls, I say we just enjoy it while we can, don’t you? You know it’ll be absolute mayhem here again before we know it!’
The other two laughed in agreement before they all tucked in to their well-deserved meal.
Just as they were finishing, however, the afternoon calm was broken by the loud voice of a sergeant who appeared out of the blue. ‘Excuse me, ladies, but everything in the camp must be packed up immediately. Please set to work without delay. We will be moving out in three hours,’ he said.
The nurses weren’t shocked or even scared, but put two and two together and decided that the Japanese were probably getting too close and that was the reason they had to get out at such speed.
‘Thank goodness we have so little to pack,’ said Madge.
Soldiers appeared to help move beds and medical equipment, and dismantle the tents. With fifteen minutes still to go before the three-hour deadline the convoy was ready to move out.
This time the nurses travelled in an army truck instead of the old green ambulance so they were able to look out at the rolling Arakan hills that were entwined with stretches of often impenetrable jungle. The fragrant wild flowers and beauty of the multi-coloured foliage provided the background against which the brutal hand-to-hand confrontations took place day and night. For the first time in days there was no rain and the journey made the most welcome of changes from the emotionally draining weeks they had spent nursing young men with life-changing injuries and the sheer intensity of dealing with increasing volumes of casualties.
During the journey the girls began discussing the time they had spent so far working at the CCS.
‘The men are just so brave. Virtually every one I nursed simply wanted to get back alongside their pals,’ Madge said as the truck shook and bumped its way out of the valley where their tented village had been home for the past weeks.
They thought they were returning to the coast and then north to Chittagong so when the convoy headed south instead of due west back to the Bay of Bengal, the nurses looked at one another in surprise.
The fact that they were told so little had always been a source of humour but they certainly were informed in this instance because their happy-go-lucky driver announced, ‘We’ve got the Japs on the run, ladies, and the plan is to set up another CCS a lot closer to the action and a lot further south.’
‘If we were moving home back in Blighty, talk would be all about the house and what the new garden would look like. Here it’s all about changing one tent for another and the number of snakes and tarantulas and leaches that will be slithering around!’ Vera said.
The camp was fully operational within hours of their arrival. Madge tried to pay special attention to the increasing number of troops who were being brought in to the new CCS after ‘cracking up’ following months of fighting in jungle territory. They hadn’t been shot or wounded so there was no visible sign of the trauma they were experiencing, and as a result she felt a little out
