229656 Pte. Alfred Edwin Morris Royal Army Medical Corps 28th Field Ambulance from:Stourbridge Road, Lye, Worcestershire My father, Edwin Morris, later Archbishop of Wales, wrote this:
I was posted to the 73rd General Hospital at Trouville and given the job of telephone orderly. As I had never used the telephone before, this was an odd appointment, but I soon got the hang of it.
In the early autumn of 1918 we had a lot of fatal cases of influenza at the hospital. Big strong men would die of this within a very few days, and the doctors seemed to be at a loss how to deal with it. Somehow it seemed worse that soldiers should die of a civilian illness in a safe area than of wounds on the field of battle.
It was while I was telephone orderly at the 73rd General Hospital that rumours of a possible armistice began to circulate, and on the morning of November 11th I received the official message that at 11 a.m. the hostilities would cease. I took it to the Colonel, who could hardly believe it. He rang through to confirm it, and then authorized the release of the news to the hospital. The effect was magical. The hospital began to empty immediately. Discipline went to the winds and patients who had been confined to bed poured out and went down to the town in their hospital blue, where they were given free drinks in the estaminets. It was three or four days before we got them all back.
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