Vera Brittain when a VAD nurse. (Literary Executors for the Vera Brittain Estate, 1970 &The Vera Brittain Fonds, McMaster University Library)
From early August 1917 until the end of April 1918 Vera Brittain served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at No 24 General Hospital, Étaples. She wrote about this experience in her acclaimed and powerful memoir Testament of Youth in the chapter entitled ‘Between the Sandhills and the Sea’. Étaples is a fishing port fifteen miles from Boulogne, and just to the north the British established a large infantry training camp and a complex of nine major hospitals, almost entirely comprised of huts and tents.
A plan of the Étaples Base Camp and hospital complex with No 24 General Hospital marked. (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/document/9127/4558)
The area of the Étaples Base Camp and hospital complex today. The area occupied by No 24 General Hospital is now covered by housing.
She was first assigned to the ward for acute German cases and then treated mustard gas cases suffering severe skin blistering and temporary or sometimes permanent blindness.
A Canadian victim of mustard gas at No.7 Canadian General Hospital, Etaples, c. 1917 (Library and Archives Canada/ Wikimedia).
No 24 General Hospital was not in the ‘front line’, as the fighting was never less than fifty miles from Étaples, nor was it a Casualty Clearing Station but it was bombed several times in 1918. The hospitals were hit by bombs because they were built alongside the Boulogne to Paris railway and were adjacent to the major complex of training camps, both of which were targeted. Vera experienced over a month of night-time air raids which left her exhausted and ‘more frightened than I had ever been in my life’. She left Étaples before the worst bombing raids of May, June and August 1918 when patients and nurses were killed in No 24 General and neighbouring hospitals.
A First Aid Nursing Yeomanry driver with an unexploded German aerial bomb at a British hospital in Calais, 1917.
Join me on a battlefield tour with The Cultural Experience:
The War Poets: Words, Music and Landscapes, 10th-13th July 2023
First & Last Shots 1914 & 1918
Medics & Padres in the Great War
Walking the Somme, Summer 2023
More Information about Battlefield Tours
Where and how did Edward Brittain die?
Protection against Mustard Gas
‘Anon.’ no longer: the author of the ‘Menin Gate’ poem revealed
Simon Jones Historian 