Description:On 17th August the Millicent Sutherland Ambulance were sent to Namur and established their hospital in the convent of Les Soeurs de Notre Dame. On 22nd August German forces attacked Namur and the hospital was unindated with wounded soldiers.
In her book ‘Six Weeks at the War’, which Millicent wrote in order to raise funds for the Millicent Sutherland Ambulance Car Convoy, Millicent recalls her experience of those first days of the Ambulance Unit in a number of diary entries:
For August 21st she writes: ‘we heard the explosion of another bomb in the next street. People were rushing hither and thither in a distracted manner, but no one could say who had been killed…I thought it better to get my nurses to the shelter of the Convent, as German shells directed upon the station were beginning to fly over the town. We heard the long screaming whistle as they rushed through the air like some stupendous firework, and the distant explosion.’
In an entry for August 22nd she writes: ‘Never shall I forget the afternoon of August 22…The wounded indeed! Six motor-cars and as many wagons were at the door, and they were carrying in those unhappy fellows. Some were on stretchers, others were supported by willing Red Cross men. One or two of the stragglers fell up the steps from fatigue and lay there. Many of these men had been for three days without food or sleep in the trenches.’
Millie notes that ‘in less than 20 minutes we had 45 wounded in our hands’ – men wounded by shrapnel and bullet wounds. She writes ‘so many of the men were in a state of prostration bordering almost on dementia, that I seemed instantly enveloped in the blight of war. I felt stunned – as if I were passing through an endless nightmare.’
On August 24th German troops set fire to Namur as they took up occupation of the town. Millicent recalls ‘In the afternoon we ventured into the smoky street. It was like walking through a dense fog. All the buildings were smouldering. The whole of the market-place and the Hotel de Ville had been burnt and the dear little café where we went for our meals before the bombardment…one could hardly walk in for the number of German troops massed in the streets, bivouacking with their rifles stacked before them. The streets were practically impassable, but infantry battalions forced a way through artillery batteries, and hundreds and hundreds of motor transport wagons’.
To read more extracts from 'Six Weeks at the War', click on the images on the left.