A Cork nun’s extraordinary life at war

LAST month, during a walking tour of Béthune in northern France, our guide recalled the work of a Cork woman, Kate McCarthy, who nursed wounded soldiers during both world wars. Her niece, Sr Breda McCarthy of the Loreto Convent in Bray, told me this extraordinary woman’s story.

Kate McCarthy was born near Drimoleague in 1895. Aged 18, she joined the Franciscans in Cork and was transferred to Béthune, a beautiful market town with buildings dating back to the 14th Century. When the Great War broke out, Béthune became a major hospital centre. With so many British casualties, English-speaking nurses were, presumably, much in demand. For four terrible years, Kate nursed Allied, and some German, wounded.

Béthune, and its 15,000 citizens, survived the first three years of the conflict almost unscathed. Then, in spring 1918, the Germans launched the ‘Ludendorff offensive’ and the town was soon on the front line. In three days during May of that year, 70,000 shells rained down, destroying 90% of its buildings. The famous belfry, now UNESCO World Heritage listed, was ‘beheaded’ but most of the ancient structure survived. When Kate McCarthy moved to the United States in 1920, she left behind a landscape of ruin and desolation. Photographs exhibited today in the basement of a furniture shop on the Grand Place give a vivid impression of life at that time.