MAHENO'S RECORD

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 148, 25 June 1935, Page 11

MAHENO'S RECORD

SERVICE IN WAR.

A HOSPITAL' SHIP

After a long and eventful career, the Union Steam Ship Company's wellknown steamer Maheno, which has been lying idle in Sydney since the beginning of March, has been sold to a firm of Japanese ship-breakers and will be converted into scrap metal in Japan. Her record as an intercolonial steamer is well known; she held the Sydney-Wellington steaming record for twenty-five years; but her most valuable service—as a hospital ship during the Great War—is in danger of being forgotten. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the Maheno was chartered by the New Zealand Government and converted into a hospital ship. She served until the end of 1915 in the Mediterranean, and arrived at Auckland on January 1, 1916, with a large number of sick and wounded New Zealanders. THE MEDITERRANEAN. Soon afterwards, the Maheno was again chartered, by the War Office, as a hospital ship, and she sailed from Wellington on January 26. Late in February she arrived at Suez. In the Red Sea she picked up a ship, carrying military invalids, disabled by the loss of her propeller and drifting ashore in a rough sea, and took her in tow. The Maheno arrived back at Wellington in about the middle of April, bringing 326 invalids. In the voyage to Egypt and the return to New/Zealand a few major operations and many minor ones were performed, and the X-ray apparatus; and bacteriological laboratory were much in use. After sailing again from Port Chalmers on the outward voyage on April 28 engine trouble was experienced, which delayed the ship for over a week. Several men on board were being taken to England to be provided 1 with artificial limbs. The Maheno coaled at Colombo, and then proceeded to Alexandria. A large proportion of the patients onboard were Australians and the rest were British soldiers from Gallipoli, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. CROSS-CHANNEL SERVICE. Arriving at Southampton on July 3, the Maheno took up service between England and France. The great Somme offensive had begun, and the British casualties were heavy. The Maheno was filled from stem' to stern, and the decks were converted into wards by hanging up canvas screens all round the ship. Feeding the patients and dressing their wounds was a work of great magnitude, and the labours of the staff never ended. On ( her first trip across the Channel the Maheno carried 1141 wounded. She continued carrying the wounded between France and England until October -28. "Even to those who are inured to the sight of suffering," wrote a member of the staff at the time, "there is something almost overwhelming in. the concentrated misery that war engenders." "Fortunately," he adds (rather ironically), "most of the wounded recover and return to the army." It was a luxury, he continued, for the wounded to get away from the terrific din of; the battlefields, and 'merciful Providence . had endowed them with! the faculty of not looking too far ahead or too far behind. During her service between France and England, the Maheno crossed the Channel more than forty times, and in one week she made seven trips. Occasionally she would be,held up while submarines were disposed of or mines removed from her course. The constant danger from enemy mines and the frequent altering of course through the English minefields made the navigation of the 120 miles from port to 'port a strenuous and trying task, and placed a heavy strain on the navigators of the ship. Of the 15,000 wounded carried from France to England by the Maheno, some 12,000 were from the British Isles; most of them were Kitchener's men. She also carried irom France 973 wounded German prisoners, who "fraternised- freely with the British." SURGICAL WORK. To deal adequately with the medical and surgical work carried out on the Maheno would be a task of great difficulty. When she was in the Channel, Major Christie wrote, "one came •across hundreds of Cases with WOqnds such as one .could scarcely think it possible for anyone to survive;- cases with, great ". masses of muscle torn away, leaving huge, ragged wounds; nerves severed, or brain, or spinal cord injured, causing paralysis; wounds of the mouth and neck, making swallowing almost impossible; . . . and several who. were hopelessly blind." Very often the patients had "come .to the ship almost straight from the field with mud and dirt from the trenches still on them. The endurance of the patients and the skill and enthusiasm of the surgical staff were beyond praise. -Three hundred and eighty New Zealand sick and wounded were embarked at Southampton on October 28; nearly all were permanently unfit for active service. When the Maheno arrived at Auckland she had carried almost 16,000 patients and had steamed over 52,000 miles during her second charter. She had made nine voyages to New Zealand by the end of the war.