Page 34 - 1918 February - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 127

T A K E N DOWN TO BOAT

"We had just gotten inside the doors here when a naval officer
stopped us and asked i f two nurses would come down to the American
hospital ship, that they simply had to have help. The word American
caught me and I said I would go provided Miss Saunders (the school
nurse) would go. She agreed, and so we were dumped bag and
baggage into another car and taken down to the boat.

"This ship, Old Colony, has been sold to the British government
to be made over into a hospital ship and the Americans were just
delivering her. She used to run between Boston and New York ^nd
is not a sea-going vessel at all. On the way up from Boston, I guess
they rolled all over the ocean, so none of the crew were very bright
about the prospect of crossing. She had been out in the stream for
about two weeks and the boys were getting very anxious to dock.
Only the day before the explosion the tug was to have come and
pulled her to dock, but failed, which was most fortunate, as they
would have docked at the navy yard and would have been right in
the path of the explosion and been blown into a thousand bits.

113 PATIENTS ON BOARD

"There were 113 patients on board and only three nurses to look
after them at first, and, believe me, we did work some. 1 hardly
closed my eyes for sixty hours and when I did try I could not sleep.
There was absolutely no organization to anything in Halifax. No
one had time to stop long enough to organize anything. We had all
kinds and classes of people as patients, white and black; women and
children, with all kinds of injuries. After the first few days I was
in the operating room all the time and I did see and learn a lot.

"One of the doctors had been at the front and he was so nice
about explaining everything as he went along. He was good on
improvising, which was another help, f o r we had so much of that
thing to do. I can't begin to describe the horrors of i t all. Even
yet they are finding bodies that were buried under the debris, and I
suppose they w i l l never be able to find all of them, f o r some were
burned to death and others, I guess, were cut to pieces.

T A K E ROUNDABOUT ROUTE

"The night we went into Halifax the city was burning and we
were forced to take a roundabout route on that account. On one
side of the road you would see a hous.e burning, and silhouetted
against the flames would be a group of people watching their last
possession burning. Others would be frantically digging in the
debris in an endeavor to locate some missing member of the family.