An early use of blood transfusion to save life in a Casualty Clearing Station
Second Lieutenant Cyril George Edwards, Bombing Officer, 2/7th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion
266407 Acting Corporal Charles Elsworth, 2/7th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion
In early May 1917, the battalions of 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division were fighting at Bullecourt, attempting to complete the capture of the village. When the division was withdrawn to rest on 14th May, and marched out to Ervillers, the Germans still clung to the northeast corner of the village, and it would fall to 58th (2/1st London) Division to finally capture Bullecourt on 17th May.
After a period of rest and training spent at Gomiécourt,
northwest of Bapaume, the 62nd Division was back in the area, and
July 1917 opened with 2/7th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion, West Yorkshire
Regiment holding trenches at Lagnicourt. The battalion marched out to
Vaulx-Vraucourt to spend a welcome five days in billets, undergoing training.
When the battalion returned to the trenches on 10th
July, it took up positions between Lagnicourt and Quéant, and that night 2nd
Lt George William Curry was ordered to take 10 men to raid a German position to the
south of Quéant where the enemy had established posts along an embankment on
ground slightly higher than that which the West Yorkshire men held. 2nd
Lt Curry formed his men up at an old Hindenburg Line position surrounded by old
German wire and he led them north easterly, following the contour of the ground
until they were within 50 yards of the German position, which was marked by
some felled trees. He and his men then crawled more than 30 yards to observe
and decide which point they should attack.
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| 2nd Lt Curry's raid converted to a reconnaissance patrol to the German position at 57c.D.13.b.0.3 on 10th July 1917 [McMaster University] |
The patrol observed a group of three men, one of them an
officer, walking between positions in the German line. They observed that an
alert sentry challenged the officer and admitted him to the position after a
password was given. The same group of Germans then walked about 30 yards from
that position to another, whereupon their group was challenged once more by
another sentry. Despite the discipline and alertness of the German sentries,
their night-time routine was not as disciplined as it should have been and the
raiding group lead by 2nd Lt Curry was able to hear the Germans in
conversation and the fixing and unfixing of bayonets. He estimated that at each
of the German positions there were about twenty men. He judged that his little
force of eleven men, including himself, was not sufficient to stand any chance
of success if they were to try to enter any of the German positions. When it
was safe for them to do so, 2nd Lt Curry ordered his men to retire,
and they succeeded in getting back to their starting position just under an
hour after they had left.
The decision to abort the raid taken by 2nd Lt
Curry was possibly as brave as it was wise. He had only commissioned in March
1917 and joined the battalion from Etaples on 20th April. The
fighting around Bullecourt in May had done much to teach him the craft of
soldiering on the battlefield that no training camp could have simulated.
Though he was still a very junior officer, with little experience, he had
already developed the maturity to know which battles to fight, and which to refuse.
Realising the likelihood that his small patrol of men would be wiped out or
captured had he ordered the patrol to attempt to enter the enemy positions, he
thought it better to take back the gathered intelligence about the alertness of
the sentries and the estimated strengths opposite than it was to not get back
at all.
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| The report made by 2Lt Curry following his aborted raid of 10th July 1917. [WO 95/308/2] |
The battalion was relieved by 2/4th Duke of
Wellington’s Regiment on 13th July 1917 and marched off to D Camp at
Favreuil for rest and training, including further training for raiding enemy
positions. The battalion was in camp for a week and returned to the trenches on
21st July when it went into the support trenches, except for C
Company, which was attached to 2/6th Battalion West Yorkshire
Regiment in their trenches in front of Riencourt-lès-Cagnicourt. The following
day, Battalion HQ and A Company moved to Vraucourt, and B and D Companies moved
to Joint Trench. C Company went to rest at Iggaree Corner, just north of
Noreuil on 24th July, and then joined with the remainder of the
battalion when it relieved 2/6th Bn in the left sector of the line
in front of Riencourt-lès-Cagnicourt on 26th July.
On the night of 27th/28th July, the
battalion’s Bombing Officer, 2nd Lt Cyril George Edwards was ordered
to make a reconnaissance of the German positions which faced the corner of the
British positions formed in a breach made in the German front line. The
position was known to have a machine gun post in it, but more information was
needed about the strongpoint, such as the state of the wire defences in front
of it, and the strength and mood of the men who garrisoned it.
2nd Lt Edwards selected Corporal Charles Elsworth
to go with him on the patrol, and the two men had until just before midnight to
prepare for it. A reconnaissance patrol needed to be able to move easily and
silently to give it the best chance of success without detection by the enemy. To
achieve this, both men would have left webbing and belt equipment behind and
emptied their pockets of anything that might identify their unit if the patrol
went wrong, and they were captured. They will have swapped their steel helmets
for woollen hats or rolled up balaclavas. Whatever ammunition and other
weaponry they decided to take with them would need to be carried in their
pockets. They would blacken their faces and their hands and check each other
over for anything that might shine. As a final check, they would jump up and
down in front of each other to ensure that what little they were carrying
didn’t make noise when they moved.
At midnight, the two men slipped out of Joy Ride Support Trench
and made for the German wire at a point south of Riencourt-lès-Cagnicourt, where,
today, a shrine stands on a track off Rue de Clichy, which runs south towards
Noreuil. On reaching the wire, the men turned north to begin their
reconnaissance of the enemy strongpoint in what the British had called Bulldog
Trench.
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| The area between Bullecourt and Riencourt-les-Cagnicourt with joy Ride Support Trench in the Centre (National Library of Scotland) |
After only ten yards on the northern leg of their patrol, the men were seen, and two German stick grenades were thrown at them from about five yards away from them. 2nd Lt Edwards caught the first grenade thrown and threw it back in the direction of where it had come from, but the second grenade landed at his feet. As the battalion’s bombing officer, he would have known the destructive power of a German grenade when it was so close, and he would also have known how little time he had left in which to respond to the situation. Knowing that a split second could count for everything, and not knowing precisely where Cpl Elsworth was behind him, 2nd Lt Edwards tried to stamp on the grenade to push it into the ground hoping that it might mitigate some of the blast when it exploded. He then deliberately remained standing on the grenade to shield Cpl Elsworth from the blast.
When the German grenade exploded under 2nd Lt
Edwards’ right boot, it blew off his foot and severely injured his leg below
the knee. Realising that his officer was seriously wounded and immobile, Cpl
Elsworth, who was completely unscathed, went to him, and began to drag him back
towards the British line. Under fire until they reached the British trench,
Charles Elsworth had succeeded in rescuing his officer without further injury
to either of them. Cyril Edwards was conscious and lucid enough to give his report
to another officer before he was taken off for medical treatment, but it was
clear that he was in grave danger of death.
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| Google Maps image of the Shrine, south of Riencourt-les-Cagnicourt as it appears today |
It was fortunate for Cyril Edwards that he was swiftly
evacuated to 3rd Casualty Clearing Station at Grevillers because at
this medical unit, only a fortnight earlier, Captain Arthur Rendle Short had
been taken on strength. Captain Short, as he was in the RAMC, was a well-known
and brilliant doctor in civil life. He had gained a BSc in 1899 and went on to
win so many scholarships for study that the Bristol Medical School felt it was
necessary to change the rules to make it impossible for one student to win so
many and deprive others of the chance to win one. He completed his medical
training at London University College Hospital. As junior doctor posts were
unpaid at the time, he made his living and earned an income through lecturing
and teaching. He gained his full surgeon’s license in 1913.
Arthur Rendle Short was commissioned into the Royal Army
Medical Corps on 16th April 1915 to work in the UK at 2nd
Southern General Hospital in Bristol, where he was from. He went to France some
time later and served with 61st Casualty Clearing Station before
moving to 3rd Casualty Clearing Station, where he became responsible
for the initial care and treatment of 2nd Lt Edwards.
Military medicine and surgery made enormous leaps forward
during the Great War, with military doctors innovating and bringing forward new
methods of keeping wounded soldiers alive. Since the first half of the
nineteenth century, peer reviewed publications such as the British Medical
Journal and The Lancet had circulated the findings of doctors of all
disciplines, bringing their new ideas and practices to the wider medical world.
One such doctor was Lawrence Bruce Robertson, who was a surgeon at the
University of Toronto, but who was now serving as a major in the Canadian Army
Medical Corps. He had made a study of haemorrhagic shock, and how blood transfusion
could be used to treat it. Major Robertson had put his theories into practice
and submitted papers to the medical publications detailing some of the cases he
had been involved with and the successes he had achieved.
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| L. Bruce Robertson beside Canadian Red Cross truck, ca. [1914-1918]. L. Bruce Robertson fonds, F 1374, Archives of Ontario, I0050290 Copyright: Queen’s Printer for Ontario |
When blood transfusions were first used in the military
setting, they were confined to the large base hospitals, most of which were on
the French coast, as far from the front as they could be. Many of the wounded
who might have been saved by a transfusion of blood will have died before they
reached those hospitals. Major Robertson is credited with developing a method
of administering blood transfusions in a Casualty Clearing Station, and for his
creation of a mobile transfusion kit which fitted into a carrying case the size
of a briefcase. The kits were distributed among Casualty Clearing Stations
enabling the pioneering treatment to be more widely used.
The condition of 2nd Lt Edwards when he was
brought to 3rd Casualty Clearing Station was extremely serious. He
was gravely ill, and it is thought, from the account of the procedure written
by Capt Short, that the transfusion he performed on 2nd Lt Edwards
was even more rudimentary. The need to tackle the shock that 2nd Lt
Edwards was suffering was so urgent that there was no time to go through the
procedure to identify the blood type that would be needed, and no time to set
up the indirect transfusion kit. Instead, he asked for a volunteer donor, and performed
the transfusion by inserting a needle connected to a tube into the artery of
the donor, and the needle at the other end of the tube into a vein in 2nd
Lt Edwards. With so many factors that could go wrong, not least the introduction
of a volatile blood type, the procedure was extremely risky, but without it 2nd
Lt Edwards was sure to die anyway. The expertise of Capt Short, and good luck
in selecting a suitable blood donor combined to produce an immediate
improvement in 2nd Lt Edwards’s condition, and he was soon stable
enough to be operated on and have a proper amputation performed on his lower
right leg. Following the amputation, Edwards was moved to the Red Cross
Hospital at Rouen until he had recovered sufficiently to endure the evacuation
back to England.
Clearly, 2nd Lt Edwards’s days as an active
service officer were over. He would now go into a long period of convalescence
and rehabilitation in a variety of hospitals in England, where he would
eventually receive a prosthetic leg.
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| 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards recovering from his wounds at Ilfracombe, in 1918. NAM. 2000-05-126-62 |
For his gallantry in protecting Cpl Elsworth from the grenade blast by risking his own life, 2nd Lt Cyril Edwards was awarded an immediate Distinguished Service Order. The announcement was made in the London Gazette on 25th September 1917, but it would take until January of the following year before the citation for the ward was published. The published citation makes it clear that the decision to try to shield Cpl Elsworth from the grenade blast by covering it with his leg was a deliberate one, made in the full knowledge that he might die to save his corporal. In many ways, the citation for the DSO awarded to 2nd Lt Edwards, which speaks of self-sacrifice and devotion to others over himself, is like the citations for Victoria Cross awards made for saving life, and it is often said that a DSO being awarded to such a junior officer was a ‘near miss’ for a Victoria Cross. Between the time of the DSO announcement, and the publication of the citation, 2nd Lt Edwards also received a Mention in Despatches, most probably for his part in a trench raid on the night of 16th/17th July 1917, following which, he ensured that all his men got back to the battalion's line.
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| The Distinguished Service Order awarded to 2nd Lt Edwards. NAM. 2000-05-15-1 |
For his bravery in rescuing his officer, Cpl Charles
Elsworth, a married father of two young children, a daughter and a son, was awarded a Military Medal, and this was also published on 25th
September 1917. He would be killed on 22nd November 1917 in fighting
at Annuex. His body was not identified for burial, and he is now commemorated
on the Cambrai Memorial.
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| Cpl Elsworth's name engraved on the Cambrai Memorial (note the omission of his MM from the inscription) |
During September 1917, 2nd Lt Edwards was moved
to a hospital at Endsleigh, and during his time there, he began to compile a
photograph album of his numerous treatments, and his photography continued
after he moved to a convalescent hospital at Watermouth Castle in Devon, and
later to Dover House in London.
His convalescence progressed well, and he was fitted with a
prosthetic leg in 1918. His progress was so good that before very long, he was
able to walk unaided on his new leg, and his balance was good enough to let him
stand unsupported while he took a photograph of himself using a mirror.
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| Cyril Edwards takes a photograph of himself to record his progress with his new leg. NAM. 2000-05-126-119 |
When the war ended, and he returned to civil life, Cyril
Edwards went back to work in the family business in Bloomsbury in London,
however, by the time of his marriage to Alice Adela Aida de Braga in May 1920,
he is described as a Government Official. His address in Marchmont Street
backed on to Aberdeen House in Kenton Street, where Alice’s family lived in
Apartment 17. Unfortunately, the marriage would not last.
In 1931, twenty-one-year-old Effie Sales began lodging at
the Aberdeen House apartment of the Edwards’. Effie lived with the Edwards’
into 1933. It appears that a relationship developed between Cyril Edwards and
Effie Sales, and by 1935, Edwards was, once again, living with his family on
Marchmont Street, while Effie Sales was sharing a flat with her brother Donald,
on Queen’s Avenue in Muswell Hill. Living directly opposite the Edwards’ house
in 1935, was a nine-year old Kenneth Williams, who would go on to be one of
Britain’s best loved comedy actors. Cyril Edwards and Effie Sales married in
Edmonton in 1936, and the couple, along with Effie’s brother Donald, moved into
a larger flat on Queen’s Avenue, they all moved again, to Southgate, near Arnos
Grove.
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| Aberdeen Mansions (formerly Aberdeen House) Kenton Street, Bloomsbury, London [Peter Hobday - Flikr] |
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