It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of
potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until
our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black
pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of
it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we
went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the
Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing
cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back
to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings
were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of
skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or
bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys
as I could walk in--these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they
didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.
We had one real luxury in the dressing station--a piano. While we cooked
and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.
There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for
the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and
dead horses rotted, we went without--once for as long as three days.
During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of it. Even
then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.
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