Usual travel for 3 or 4 of us was
by GI-driven Jeep; or if joining other riders we sat facing each other on the
benches of an Armored Personnel Carrier, sometimes canvas covered, often
open. We drove south and west of London
to a staging area about 130 miles, set up on the Salisbury Plain at Tidworth in
Wiltshire County. Unexpectedly my breath
was just taken away. On the roadsides.
acres and acres were completely covered with rows of tanks, of Jeeps, of small
planes and other olive drab wartime equipment shipped over from the US. Thousands and thousands of them.
Once at Tidworth we met the General
who was the Administrator of the 95th, and the Colonel, his
assistant. We were introduced to the 60 doctors, with the Surgery Lt. Col. from
Chicago General Hospital and the Medical Lt. Col. from Massachusetts General
Hospital. The Head Nurse of the 110
nurses was a Major. The nurses came from
many different hospitals from large and small cities in the US. Our Red Cross team of 3 Recreation workers and
Secretary was headed by an experienced social worker, Margaret Stewart, from
New York City.
At one of our first huddles, she
(and we) decided that we must abide by all rules made by the Head Nurse, even
though she had no authority over us, and that we should mingle as much as
possible with the nurses, and not nurture our own little clique.
In a few days the 95th
Gen. got orders to move into its quarters in Ringwood, in Hampshire, about 12
miles north of Bournemouth, the resort city on the Southern Coast of England. So off drove our long line of Jeeps, personnel
carriers and ambulances across the Salisbury Plain and through the large city
of Salisbury—with its famous and beautiful 13th century Gothic
cathedral. (I am delighted to recall my first
view of Salisbury because I was to learn many years later two romantic bits of
knowledge: first, that the ancient
natives chose the city’s location by shooting an arrow and watching where it
landed on the Plain and second, that on my father’s side my earliest known
English forbears came from Salisbury.)
But the greatest surprise came as our 95th convoy drove on
south not far from the city.
What could that immense broken
circle of monolithic stones be doing out in that field on the right side of the
road? Just standing there all
alone? I had never heard of Stonehenge.
Soon we started seeing farmlands
with charming hedgerows for fences, and inviting little cottages with thatched
roofs and then a storybook village, Ringwood, with lanes guided through rows of
trees and possibly a pony cart or two. A
couple miles beyond we reached our new home:
a rundown old WWI Army post built of concrete rectangular buildings,
turned into an ammunition dump in the decades between the wars. All 115 women unloaded into our new hotel—one
of the ward-sized rectangles, concrete floors, one separate room for the Major,
and 114 army cots with their tumbles of bagged straw for mattresses marching
down the length of the room in 4 lines.
Space between the cots was little more that the width of the cot
itself. There were a few windows here
and there. No plumbing. Separately, about 20 feet away from one side
of our “hotel” was our latrine with its line of wash bowls and several flush
toilets.
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