'Nasty work': The forgotten role of Canada's nursing sisters during WW I
CBC
When Cape Breton's Helen Kendall headed overseas in March 1917 to work as a nurse with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, she almost didn't survive the voyage when the ship she was on was stopped by a German submarine.
By this point in the war, the Germans were desperate.
They faced food shortages and lacked materials to produce weapons and munitions. While the Germans had long tried to cripple the Allied war effort by sinking ships carrying troops and materials, they started sinking hospital ships — vessels that were once off-limits.
The ship Kendall was on, the S.S. Essequibo, a former passenger liner that had been retrofitted to become a hospital ship, was stopped for more than an hour before it was allowed to continue on. The ship arrived at its destination in Liverpool, England, the following day, which was March 16, 1917.
It wasn't the only time Kendall found herself in danger during the First World War, but fate always managed to be on her side.
"She had a charmed life in a way," said Brian Tennyson, a military history professor at Cape Breton University.
He carried out the research on an upcoming virtual exhibit created by Cape Breton University's Beaton Institute. The exhibit looks at the First World War through the eyes of four Cape Bretoners who took part in the war effort in different ways.
Kendall is used as an example of the forgotten role that approximately 3,000 Canadian nurses — also known as nursing sisters — played in the war. It is often overshadowed by the more than 600,000 Canadian men who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
"It was nasty work a lot of the time," said Tennyson. "It was very emotional, I'm sure, because young guys came in and you got 18-year-old kids with their legs blown off. Not everybody can take that day in and day out."
To become a nurse with the Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC), the women were required to meet specific criteria, including being trained as a nurse before enlistment, says the website of the Canadian War Museum.
"It also eliminated non-Caucasian women, who were at the time ineligible to train as nurses in Canada. Appointment to the CAMC nursing service also required women to have British citizenship, to possess high moral character, physical fitness, and be between the ages of 21 and 38."
Born and raised in Sydney, Kendall studied surgical nursing at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, graduating in December 1916. Her war experience started with a posting at a hospital in Orpington, England, but then she started serving at hospitals in France beginning in September 1917.
The exhibit includes audio from an interview conducted with her in 1980, where she talked about how her duties included working as an anesthetist. Because doctors were so busy, they didn't necessarily have time to administer anesthetics to patients.
"But they [the patients] were the devil to give anesthetics to," said Kendall. "They could fight like thieves.