Following on from recent Remembrance commemorations, marking the beginning of the final year of the First World War centenary, historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, whose Battle of the Somme book has just been published as a paperback, highlights the torment of the soldiers who were wounded on July 1, 1916, the worst day in the history of the British Army, as seen through the eyes of an Oxfordshire nurse who cared for them

AFTER the horrific first day of the Battle of the Somme, when the British Army sustained more than 57,000 casualties, the nurses in some hospitals were not even alerted before the first batch of wounded were sent to them.

At least that was the experience of nurse Marjorie Beeton, from Charlbury, granddaughter of Mrs Isabella Beeton, the famous 19th century domestic goddess and cookbook writer, at the No. 2 British Red Cross Hospital in Rouen.

Included in her diary for the second day after the July 1, 1916, attack is the following note:

"I was washing up breakfast things at 10am when the convoy whistle blew.

"On looking out, I saw the most pathetic procession struggling up the drive, about 30 of the weariest looking men, mud coated tatters of clothing and grimly stained bandages covering their mutilated limbs.

"Some were limping, and others bent nearly double with the painful weight of smashed up arms.

"I thought first of all they were a party of Tommies, but when they got closer, one could see they were officers and realized that the push must indeed have begun.

"There must have been an unprecedented call on the ambulances if they had to send officers on foot.

"An army of orderlies appeared running promptly and helped the weary warriors in.

"They hadn’t as we first thought travelled up from the station.

"But the big lorries that conveyed them couldn’t get inside our gates and so deposited them outside."

Beeton’s subsequent diary entries refer to a Captain Charles Bellamy, 'an appalling case. His spine is hopelessly injured. He is paralysed below the waist. He is such a fine looking man; most cheery and plucky.’

He needed to be brave if Beeton’s diary entries are anything to go by.

'Poor Captain Bellamy’ had to endure day after day of painful dressings, getting worse every day, and even an emergency operation conducted on the ward.

The opening up of his wounds led Beeton to comment that the reek was ‘too appalling’.

That prompted the following entry in Beeton’s diary: "I’m getting very Shavian in my ideas on surgery.

"Why torture the poor thing when they know he is bound to die in a day or two?"

It was with great relief that on July 25, over three weeks after Bellamy was wounded in the great attack, Beeton was able to write: "Bellamy died at 3 am poor man. It was such a happy release as life was only agony for him."

Another low light was the case of a mutilated officer who ‘cannot possibly live’ being visited by his brother, himself missing one leg, lost a year before at Ypres.

"It was cruel to see the cripple sitting beside his dying brother, a graphic testimony of the frightfulness" she wrote.

But perhaps her favourite patient was a Major Philip Morton:

"He was in with both legs wounded, one very badly fractured below the knee.

"This poor man had lain out on the field for 48 hours before being picked up.

"He was deliberately fired on by the Germans as he was lying helpless, and his other leg was hit, as was his water bottle, so he had no drink."

Major Morton was to endure a series of amputations as more and more of his infected legs were cut off.

But even that did not save him, and six weeks after he was wounded, he too passed away. Beeton completed her account by writing: "Altogether a very sad day to finish my B floor duty. I go to the theatre tomorrow."

The paperback edition of Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Somme: Into the Breach published by Penguin is out now, as is the updated 75th Anniversary paperback edition of his Enigma: the Battle for the Code with new material added, published by Orion’s Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

If any reader has a photograph of Marjorie Beeton, Hugh would be pleased to hear from them via hughsebagmontefiore.com