Gassed
The end of their service at the Front came for Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker in March 1918, in the course of a huge German offensive.
Exhausted by having worn their uncomfortable gas masks for two days, the nurses risked removing the masks for some respite — and at that very moment a salvo of shells containing mustard gas and arsenic exploded near by.
Mairi recalled the event in her 1976 interview:
'The whole place went up — you couldn't hear yourself think … It went on non-stop I suppose for, oh, 48 hours — 48 hours of intensive bombardment …
'We had a pillbox where we slept in bunks … and the passageway from where we received the wounded to the dug-out where we slept had been entirely blown in with shellfire … They lobbed in a salvo of gas shells into this broken-down passageway … We took a jolly good mouthful …
'The first thing I was wondering was whether we were going to ever see again because our eyes were very badly taken with it.'
— Extract quoted by permission of the Imperial War Museum.
