New Zealand Listener

Insult after injury

Some medical staff were surprised by the ignorance of the public about their sacrifice.

-

There could be a lack of appreciati­on and understand­ing when medical personnel came home. On March 11, 1919, the New Zealand Herald published a letter headed “Ambulance Man’s Complaint” and signed “Stretcher-Bearer – NZ Medical Corps, Rotorua”.

Since reporting to the hospital a few days before, “after considerab­le service in the field”, the correspond­ent had been “surprised and not a little disgusted to observe the attitude taken by people in this town towards men of the NZMC”.

“Is it possible that people can have such a small conception of what work in the Medical Corps really amounts to? … Do they consider the heart-breaking toil of stretcher-bearing for two, three or four days and nights in all weathers and in most cases back and forwards through shellfire, exposed to all that comes from the German guns? Can they imagine what it means to carry out a badly wounded man, on a pitch black night when German gas is thick and one has to wear a mask, stumbling along blindly, your only thought and aim to get that man ‘out’.”

Now, “given a job for awhile before he is discharged”, he had been insulted – more than once. “There are men in the Medical Corps drawing five shillings per day, when they might be drawing three or four times as much outside. Are they to be blamed because they are sent here for duty?” He regarded this as the “most unfair treatment” he had ever received.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from New Zealand