HEROIC NURSE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XX, Issue 2102, 14 April 1925, Page 6

HEROIC NURSE.

SHOT BY SNIPERS. WIRELESS AS SOLACE. The sad story of the misfortunes of a nurse who played a heroic part during the war is graphically told by a special correspondent of the Daily Chronicle:—

As the light was fading from the sky this evening, obscuring from view the pleasant countryside, I listened to the story, told in pitiful, halting accents, of a nurse’s heroism on the "Western Front and of her present plight*.

Nurse Edith Helen Clutsom lies in a small revolving shelter in the grounds of the Aylsham Poor Law Institution, 10 miles from Norwich. She is a victim of those two dread diseases, consumption and cancer. She suffers the greatest of agonies; morphia injections are being constantly made, but on her bed of sickness she is proving herself as great a heroine as on the fields of France. .No word of reproach or complaint leaves her lips.

PITTED BY BULLETS. Nurse Clutsom is only 30, yet she is one of the few living women who have known war at its worst. Her frail body is marked and pitted by German bullets —honourable wounds sustained while stretcher-bearing near the front line. Her memory is now affected by the events of the past terrible years. The nurse’s cosy hut is the atmosphere* of peace itself, and on the walls are small pictures of happy scenes, and a portrait of the Prince of Wales wearing his famous smile. There are books, too, but, best of all —for that is' what brings tbe stricken nurse consolation —there is a crystal wireless set which was installed by a few friends and individual guardians. Too weak to read and too tired to converse for any length of time, she can yet lie back on her pillows and forget her bodily tortures by listening-in to Chelmsford and 2LO.

SHOT THROUGH LUNG. Nurse Clutsom. was shot through the left lung by a German sniper. Her two arms, which she showed me with pride, are pitted by marks of ricocheting bullets, and there is still the scar showing where her left wrist was broken by a bullet which went through the hand. She was a Norfolk girl of 19 when she took to nursing. Then came the war, and she volunteered at Westminster to go to France with the Red Cross in 1915. After six months spent at Boulogne, she was sent forward near to the line, attached to the casualty clearing station. Then there came a call for nurses who would act as stretcher-bearers. Nurse Clutsom, with others, responded. “We were, perhaps, nearer the firing line than we should have been,” she explained, “but necessity brooks no delay. I did not think of the danger at the time—no nurse does. We had many escapes from being hit. Bullets from the quick-firers spurted all around, and would plough the ground, coming off suddenly and picking out pieces.

“I had been out two years when 1 got my wound in the chest. I was at a little place which I always believed to be spelt Tolon. I am not sure of the name properely. I was at the rear of the ambulance wagons on which we were taking wounded to the hospital. We,were in a railway cutting, and a sniper got me.

AT VIMY RIDGE. “We had to find shelter anywhere. Sometimes it was a bit of proppedup canvas, a shell-wrecked building, or an overhanging ledge, anywhere where first-aid could be given. “It was terrible at Vimy Wood, 'the boys kept creeping out for days—wounded, vermin-ridden, famished, some with gangrenous wounds.” Nurse Clutsom was at hospital lor a considerable time, and then returned to duty. In 1918 she left France for England, and spent a holiday in Wales. Then she took up nursing again, and for a time was at an officers’ convalescent home.

She was nursing in London when, just before Christmas, 1922, she was about to leave for Wales for another holiday, and was taken ill in the streets and removed to the infirmary. Two severe operations followed, and then she was removed to the Aylsham Institution, where, for the past 18 months, she has contemplated life from her open-air hut. She has had no pension. “I never asked for one,” she explained simply. “I gave what service I could, and I have thought nothing of it.”