www.ns.legion.ca 13 Needless to say, it wasn’t long before the troops honoured them with another affectionate nickname – “bluebirds”. The women were ill-prepared for the special hell awaiting them at the battlefields, compared to their nursing experiences in Canada. They had to adapt quickly to the horrors of modern warfare, not just in terms of the kinds of ghastly wounds suffered by the troops but also the sheer numbers of casualties. Nor were they spared discomfort because of their gender; they shared the same dangerous, unsanitary field conditions as their male colleagues and often went hungry and thirsty. Wherever they nursed, the Angels of Mercy were never far from danger. Sometimes, death found them when they were aboard hospital ships transporting the sick and wounded home to Canada. One such incident occurred during the night of 27 June 1917 when a Canadian hospital ship, the Llandovery Castle, was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. Of the 258 crew and medical staff aboard, only 24 lived to tell the story, an amazing escape considering the U-boat’s crew machinegunned the lifeboats. All 14 nursing sisters aboard perished that terrible night, among them Matron Marjory Fraser, daughter of Lt. Col. Duncan Cameron Fraser, the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0NTk1OA==