Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 227
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[Page 227]
113
The failure of the "Powers-that-be" to provide more than one little properly-equipped hospital ship for the first of the combined Navy and Army attacks, was the greatest scandal of the Gallipoli campaign.
A fleet of ambulances met us at Alexandria and rushed us out to an urgently created makeshift hospital at the British School at Stanley Bay, some seven miles along the coast. The buildings were supplemented with a dozen marquees for extra wards. An English Major of the Royal Army Medical Corps was in charge, assisted by a French Naval surgeon, two or three rather junior English medical officers, and a couple of volunteering civilian practitioners. The nursing staff comprised English, Australian and New Zealand Army nurses and a few private ones, one of whom, a very competent Sister Moseley, was the day nurse for the wounded officers, bedded three or four in a classroom.
My wounds now received their first proper attention. The groin wound healed in ten days, the femoral arteries and the hip joint having just been missed by the bullet, which went right through. But the thigh wound had become infected and suppurated badly for a long time, so much so, that there was some suggestion of amputating the leg: the Sciatic nerve had been contused to such an extent that the limb was useless, and shrinking to two-thirds its normal size. However, I survived this crisis and after two months, being in excellent health despite my crippled leg, I was moved with some others to a Red Cross convalescent home for officers set up in a magnificent white marble mansion of pure Greek Corinthian architecture. It topped a hill near the hospital and was known as the Mansion Bindernagel, this being the name of the owner, a German cotton millionaire, who had fled to his homeland.
I was able to hobble about on crutches and even go into Alexandria in a garry with an English Captain, Frank Hodsoll, who had been in my room at the hospital, and with whom I had become a close friend. We frequently drank and dined at the exclusive Khedival Club and went for drives round the city streets. But mostly, I passed the time playing cards or