consider that hospital very badly staffed, as there were only twenty
Sisters to sometimes nearly a thousand patients, all very serious cases
moreover, as we were not supposed to take in the lightly wounded at all
in this hospital. The sanitars, or orderlies, do all that probationers
in an English hospital would do for the patients, and all the heavy
lifting and carrying, so that the work is not very hard though very
continuous. There was no night staff. We all took it in turns to stay up
at night three at a time, so that our turn came about once a week. That
meant being on duty all day, all night, and all the next day, except for
a brief rest and a walk in the afternoon. Most of the Sisters took no
exercise beyond one weekly walk, but we two English people longed for
fresh air, and went out whenever possible even if it was only for ten
minutes. English views on ventilation are not at all accepted in Russia.
It is a great concession to open the windows of the ward for ten minutes
twice a day to air it, and the Sisters were genuinely frightened for the
safety of the patients when I opened the windows of a hot, stuffy ward
one night. "It is _never_ done," they reiterated, "before daylight."
The Sister Superior was the mainspring of the hospital. She really was a
wonderful person, small and insignificant to look at, except for her
eyes, which looked you through and through and weighed you in the
balance; absolutely true and straight, with a heart of gold, and the
very calmest person in all the world. I remember her, late one evening,
when everybody was rather agitated at a message which had come to say
that 400 patients were on their way to the hospital, and room could only
be made for 200 at the most. "Never mind," she said, not in the least
perturbed, "they must be made as comfortable as possible on stretchers
for the night, and to-morrow we must get some of the others moved away."
And the Sisters took their cue from her, and those 400 patients were all
taken in and looked after with less fuss than the arrival of forty
unexpected patients in most hospitals.
All night long that procession of shattered men brought in on stretchers
never ceased. The kitchen Sister stayed up all night so that each man
should have some hot soup on arrival, and all the other Sisters were at
their posts. Each man was undressed on the stretcher (often so badly
wounded that all his clothing had to be cut off him) and hastily
examined by the doctor. He was then dressed in a clean cotton shirt and
trousers and lifted into bed, either to enjoy a bowl of hot soup, or,
if the case was urgent, to be taken off in his turn to the
operating-room. And though she was no longer young and not at all
strong, there was dear Sister Superior herself all night, taking round
the big bowls of soup or sitting beside the dying patients to cheer and
comfort their last hours. How the men loved her.
It was she who gave the whole tone to the hospital--there the patients
and their welfare were the first consideration and nothing else mattered
in comparison. The hospital was not "smart" or "up to date," the wards
were not even tidy, the staff was inadequate, overworked, and
villainously housed, the resources very scanty, but for sheer
selflessness and utter devotion to their work the staff of that hospital
from top to bottom could not have been surpassed. I never heard a
grumble or a complaint all the time I was there either from a doctor, a
Sister, or an orderly, and I never saw in this hospital a dressing
slurred over, omitted, or done without the usual precautions however
tired or overworked everybody might be.
Of course the art of nursing as practised in England does not exist in
Russia--even the trained Sisters do things every hour that would horrify
us in England. One example of this is their custom of giving strong
narcotic or stimulating drugs indiscriminately, such as morphine,
codeine, camphor, or ether without doctors' orders. When untrained
Sisters and inexperienced dressers do this (which constantly happens)
the results are sometimes very deplorable. I have myself seen a dresser
give a strong hypodermic stimulant to a man with a very serious
hæmorrhage. The bleeding vessel was deep down and very difficult to
find, and the hæmorrhage became so severe after the stimulant that for a
long time his life was despaired of from extreme exhaustion due to loss
of blood. I have also heard a Sister with no training except the two
months' war course say she had given a certain man _ten_ injections of
camphor within an hour because he was so collapsed, but she had not seen
fit to tell the doctor she had done this, nor had she let him know his
patient was so much worse until he was at the point of death. Neither of
these particular incidents could have happened in the Red Cross
hospital at Warsaw as the Sisters there were properly trained; but even
there they gave drugs at their own sweet will without consulting
anyone--particularly in the night.
We were so busy at the hospital that we did not see much of Warsaw. To
the casual observer it looks a busy, modern, rather gay capital, but
almost every inch of the city is interesting historically, and nearly
all the pages of that history are red with blood. War, revolutions, and
riots seem to have been almost its normal condition, and the great broad
Vistula that flows sluggishly through it has been many a time before
stained crimson with the blood of its citizens. But this time the war is
being fought under different conditions. Russians and Poles are for the
first time working together with a common aim in view. If the only
outcome of this war was the better mutual understanding of these two
great nations, it would not have been fought entirely in vain.
When we first arrived the Russians had beaten the Germans back to the
frontier, and every one was elated with the great victory. Now at the
end of October things did not look quite so happy. The people who knew
looked anxious and harassed. The newspapers, as usual, told nothing at
all, but the news which always filters in somehow from mouth to mouth
was not good. Terrific fighting was going on outside Lodz, it was said,
and enormous German reinforcements were being poured in. Warsaw was full
to overflowing with troops going through to reinforce on the Russian
side. A splendid set of men they looked, sturdy, broad-chested, and
hardy--not in the least smart, but practical and efficient in their warm
brown overcoats and big top boots.
There are two things one notices at once about the Russian soldier. One
is his absolute disregard of appearances. If he is cold he will tie a
red comforter round his head without minding in the least whether he is
in the most fashionable street in Warsaw or in camp at the front. The
other noticeable characteristic is the friendly terms he is on with his
officers. The Prussian soldiers rarely seem to like their officers, and
it is not to be wondered at, as they treat their men in a very harsh,
overbearing way. On duty the Russian discipline is strict, but off duty
an officer may be heard addressing one of his men as "little pigeon" or
"comrade" and other terms of endearment, and the soldier, on the other
hand, will call his officer "little father" or "little brother." I
remember one most touching scene when a soldier servant accompanied his
wounded officer to hospital. The officer was quite a young,
delicate-looking boy, who had been shot through the chest. His servant
was a huge, rough Cossack, who would hardly let any of us touch his
master if he could help it, and stayed by his bed night and day till the
end, when, his great frame heaving with sobs and tears streaming down
the seamed and rugged face, he threw himself over the officer's body and
implored God to let him die too.
The hospital began to grow empty and the work slackened down, as every
possible patient was sent away to Moscow or Petrograd to make room for
the rush of wounded that must be coming from the Lodz direction. But no
patients arrived, and we heard that the railway communications had been
cut. But this proved to be untrue.
One Sunday afternoon Sister G. and I, being free, betook ourselves to
tea at the Hotel d'Europe--that well-named hostelry which has probably
seen more history made from its windows than any other hotel in Europe.
We favoured it always on Sunday when we could, for not only was a
particularly nice tea to be had, but one could also read there a not
_too_ old French newspaper. I think just at first we felt almost as cut
off from news of what was happening on the English side as we did in
Belgium. No English or French papers could be bought and the Polish and
Russian papers were as sealed books to us, and when I did succeed in
getting some long-suffering person to translate them to me, the news was
naturally chiefly of the doings of the Russian side. Later on I had
English papers sent out to me which kept me in touch with the western
front, and also by that time, too, I could make out the substance of the
Russian papers; but just at first it was very trying not to know what
was going on. We had had tea and had read of an Anglo-French success
near Ypres and returned rested and cheered to the hospital to find
Sister Superior asking for us. She had had a message from the Red Cross
Office that we were to go to Lodz next day, and were to go at once to
the Hotel Bristol to meet Prince V., who would give us full particulars.
We went off at once to the Bristol and saw Prince V., but did not get
any particulars--that was not the Prince's way. He was sitting reading
in the lounge when we arrived, a very tall, lean, handsome man with kind
brown eyes and a nose hooked like an eagle's. He greeted us very kindly
and said he would take us to Lodz next day in one of the Red Cross
automobiles, and that we must be ready at 10 A. M. I think we
earned his everlasting gratitude by asking no questions as to where and
how we were going to work, but simply said we would be ready at that
time and returned to hospital to pack, fully realizing what lucky people
we were to be going right into the thick of things, and only hoping that
we should rise to the occasion and do the utmost that was expected of
us.
We were now officially transferred from the hospital to the Flying
Column, of which Prince V. was the head. A flying column works directly
under the head of the Red Cross, and is supposed to go anywhere and do
anything at any hour of the day or night. Our Column consisted of five
automobiles that conveyed us and all our equipment to the place where we
were to work, and then were engaged in fetching in wounded, and taking
them on to the field hospital or ambulance train. The staff consisted of
Prince and Princess V., we two English Sisters, with generally, but not
always, some Russian ones in addition, an English surgeon, Colonel S.,
some Russian dressers and students, and some sanitars, or orderlies. The
luggage was a dreadful problem, and the Prince always groaned at the
amount we would take with us, but we could not reduce it, as we had to
carry big cases of cotton-wool, bandages and dressings, anæsthetics,
field sterilizer, operating-theatre equipment, and a certain amount of
stores--such as soap, candles, benzine and tinned food--as the column
would have been quite useless if it had not been to a large extent
self-supporting. Our Column was attached to the Second Army, which
operated on the eastern front of Warsaw. The Russian front changes so
much more rapidly than the Anglo-French front, where progress is
reckoned in metres, that these mobile columns are a great feature of
ambulance work here. Our front changed many miles in a week sometimes,
so that units that can move anywhere at an hour's notice are very
useful. The big base hospitals cannot quite fulfil the same need on such
a rapidly changing front.
VIII
THE BOMBARDMENT OF LODZ
It took us a long time to get to Lodz, though it is not much more than
200 kilometres away. Russian roads are villainously bad anyhow, and the
Germans, though their retreat had been hasty, had had time to destroy
the roads and bridges as they went. Another thing that delayed us were
the enormous reinforcements of troops going up from Warsaw to the front.
It was very interesting to watch the different groups as we passed,
first a Cossack regiment going up, then an immense convoy followed with
about 200 wagons of forage. Just ahead of that we passed the
remounts--sturdy, shaggy Siberian ponies. They are the most delightful
creatures in the world, as tame as a dog, and not much bigger, and many
of them of a most unusual and beautiful shade of golden cream. They have
been brought from Siberia by the thousand, and most of the little
things had never seen a motor-car before, and pranced and kicked and
jumped, and went through all kinds of circus tricks as we passed.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE POLISH FRONT]
As we grew nearer to Lodz it was sad to see a good many dead horses
lying by the roadside, mostly killed by shell-fire. The shells had made
great holes in the road too, and the last part of our journey was like a
ride on a switchback railway. It began to get dark as we came to
Breeziny, where a large number of Russian batteries were stationed. It
looked very jolly there, these large camps of men and horses having
their supper by the light of a camp-fire, with only the distant rumble
of the guns to remind them that they were at war. Two hours later we
jolted into the streets of Lodz.
Lodz is a large cotton manufacturing town--sometimes called the
Manchester of Poland--but now of course all the factories were closed,
and many destroyed by shell. I should not think it was a very festive
place at the best of times; it looked squalid and grimy, and the large
bulk of its population was made up of the most abject Jews I have ever
seen.
We had to make a long detour and get into the town by an unfrequented
country road, as Lodz was being heavily bombarded by the German guns. We
were put down at a large building which we were told was the military
hospital. Princess V., Colonel S., and a Russian student were working
hard in the operating-room, and we hastily put on clean overalls and
joined them. They all looked absolutely worn out, and the doctor dropped
asleep between each case; but fresh wounded were being brought in every
minute and there was no one else to help. Lodz was one big hospital. We
heard that there were more than 18,000 wounded there, and I can well
believe it. Every building of any size had been turned into a hospital,
and almost all the supplies of every kind had given out.
The building we were in had been a day-school, and the top floor was
made up of large airy schoolrooms that were quite suitable for wards.
But the shelling recommenced so violently that the wounded all had to be
moved down to the ground floor and into the cellars. The place was an
absolute inferno. I could never have imagined anything worse. It was
fearfully cold, and the hospital was not heated at all, for there was no
wood or coal in Lodz, and for the same reason the gas-jets gave out only
the faintest glimmer of light. There was no clean linen, and the poor
fellows were lying there still in their verminous, blood-soaked shirts,
shivering with cold, as we had only one small blanket each for them.
They were lucky if they had a bed at all, for many were lying with only
a little straw between them and the cold stone floor. There were no
basins or towels or anything to wash up with, and no spittoons, so the
men were spitting all over the already filthy floor. In the largest ward
where there were seventy or eighty men lying, there was a lavatory
adjoining which had got blocked up, and a thin stream of dirty water
trickled under the door and meandered in little rivulets all over the
room. The smell was awful, as some of the men had been there already
several days without having had their dressings done.
This was the state in which the hospital had been handed over to us. It
was a military hospital whose staff had had orders to leave at four
o'clock that morning, and they handed the whole hospital with its 270
patients over to us just as it was; and we could do very little towards
making it more comfortable for them. The stench of the whole place was
horrible, but it was too cold to do more than open the window for a
minute or two every now and then. It was no one's fault that things were
in such a horrible condition--it was just the force of circumstances and
the fortune of war that the place had been taxed far beyond its possible
capacities.
All night long the most terribly wounded men were being brought in from
the field, some were already dead when they arrived, others had only a
few minutes to live; all the rest were very cold and wet and exhausted,
and we had _nothing_ to make them comfortable. What a blessing hot-water
bottles would have been--but after all there would have been no hot
water to fill them if we had had them. But the wounded _had_ to be
brought in for shelter somewhere, and at least we had a roof over their
heads, and hot tea to give them.
At 5 A. M. there came a lull. The tragic procession ceased for
a while, and we went to lie down. At seven o'clock we were called
again--another batch of wounded was being brought in.
The shelling had begun again, and was terrific; crash, crash, over our
heads the whole time. A clock-tower close to the hospital was demolished
and windows broken everywhere. The shells were bursting everywhere in
the street, and civilians were being brought in to us severely wounded.
A little child was carried in with half its head blown open, and then an
old Jewish woman with both legs blown off, and a terrible wound in her
chest, who only lived an hour or two. Apparently she suffered no pain,
but was most dreadfully agitated, poor old dear, at having lost her wig
in the transit. They began bringing in so many that we had to stop
civilians being brought in at all, as it was more than we could do to
cope with the wounded soldiers that were being brought in all the time.
At midday we went to a hotel for a meal. There was very, very little
food left in Lodz, but they brought what they could. Coming back to the
hospital we tried everywhere to get some bread, but there was none to be
had anywhere--all the provision shops were quite empty, and the
inhabitants looked miserable and starved, the Jewish population
particularly so, though they were probably not among the poorest.
On our way back a shell burst quite close to us in the street, but no
one was hurt. These shells make a most horrible scream before bursting,
like an animal in pain. Ordinarily I am the most dreadful coward in the
world about loud noises--I even hate a sham thunderstorm in a
theatre--but here somehow the shells were so part of the whole thing
that one did not realize that all this was happening to _us_, one felt
rather like a disinterested spectator at a far-off dream. It was
probably partly due to want of sleep; one's hands did the work, but
one's mind was mercifully numbed. Mercifully, for it was more like hell
than anything I can imagine. The never-ending processions of groaning
men being brought in on those horrible blood-soaked stretchers,
suffering unimagined tortures, the filth, the cold, the stench, the
hunger, the vermin, and the squalor of it all, added to one's utter
helplessness to do more than very little to relieve their misery, was
almost enough to make even Satan weep.
On the third day after our arrival a young Russian doctor and some
Russian sisters arrived to relieve us for a few hours, and we most
thankfully went to bed--at least it was not a bed in the ordinary sense,
but a wire bedstead on which we lay down in all our clothes; but we were
very comfortable all the same.
When we woke up we were told that the military authorities had given
orders for the patients to be evacuated, and that Red Cross carts were
coming all night to take them away to the station, where some ambulance
trains awaited them. So we worked hard all night to get the dressings
done before the men were sent away, and as we finished each case, he was
carried down to the hall to await his turn to go; but it was very
difficult as all the time they were bringing in fresh cases as fast as
they were taking the others away, and alas! many had to go off without
having had their dressings done at all. The next afternoon we were
still taking in, when we got another order that all the fresh patients
were to be evacuated and the hospital closed, as the Russians had
decided to retire from Lodz. Again we worked all night, and by ten the
next morning we had got all the patients away. The sanitars collected
all the bedding in the yard to be burnt, the bedsteads were piled high
on one another, and we opened all the windows wide to let the clean cold
wind blow over everything.
We had all our own dressings and equipment to pack, and were all just
about at our last gasp from want of food and sleep, when a very kind
Polish lady came and carried princess, we two Sisters, and Colonel S.
off to her house, where she had prepared bedrooms for us. I never looked
forward to anything so much in my life as I did to my bed that night.
Our hostess simply heaped benefits on us by preparing us each a hot bath
in turn. We had not washed or had our clothes off since we came to Lodz,
and were covered with vermin which had come to us from the patients; men
and officers alike suffer terribly from this plague of insects, which
really do make one's life a burden. There are three varieties commonly
met with: ordinary fleas that no one minds in the least; white insects
that are the commonest and live in the folds of one's clothes, whose
young are most difficult to find, and who grow middle-aged and very
hungry in a single night; and, lastly, the red insects with a good many
legs, which are much less numerous but much more ravenous than the other
kinds.
After the bath and the hunt, we sat down to a delicious supper, and were
looking forward to a still more delicious night in bed, when suddenly
Prince V. arrived and said we must leave at once. We guessed instantly
that the Germans must be very near, but that he did not wish us to ask
questions, as it seemed very mean to go off ourselves and leave our kind
hosts without a word of explanation, though of course we could only obey
orders. So we left our unfinished supper and quickly collected our
belongings and took them to the hotel where our Red Cross car should
have been waiting for us. But the Red Cross authorities had sent off our
car with some wounded, which of course was just as it should be, and we
were promised another "seechas," which literally translated signifies
"immediately," but in Russia means to-day or to-morrow or not at all.
"Let us come into the hotel and get a meal while we wait," suggested the
Prince, mindful of our uneaten supper, and we followed him to the
restaurant--still mourning those beautiful beds we had left behind us,
and so tired we didn't much care whether the Germans came or not.
Nothing can express utter desolation much more nakedly than a Grand
Hotel that has been through a week or two's bombardment. Here indeed
were the mighty fallen. A large hole was ripped out of the wall of the
big restaurant, close to the alcove where the band used to play while
the smart people dined. An elaborate wine-list still graced each little
table, but coffee made from rye bread crusts mixed with a little chicory
was the only drink that a few white-faced waiters who crept about the
room like shadows could apologetically offer us. We sat there till
nearly 3 A. M., and Colonel S., utterly worn out, was fast
asleep with his head on the little table, and there was no sign of any
car, or of any Germans, so we went to lie down till morning.
In the morning things began to look cheerful. The Germans had still not
arrived, our own car turned up, and best of all the Prince heard
officially that every wounded man who was at all transportable had now
been successfully got out of Lodz. It was a gigantic task, this
evacuation of over 18,000 wounded in four days, and it is a great
feather in the Russian cap to have achieved it so successfully.