torn again and mangled. Listen; you can hear how well it works. There
is the sound of cannon and the sound of the ambulances bringing the
wounded, and the sound of the tramp of strong men going along the road
to fill the empty places.
Do you hear? Do you understand? It is all arranged just as it should be.
PARAPHERNALIA
What have all these queer things to do with the dying of this man?
Here are cotton things and rubber things and steel things and things
made of glass, all manner of things. What have so many things to do
with the final adventure of this spirit?
Here are blankets and pillows and tin boxes and needles and bottles and
pots and basins and long rubber tubes and many little white squares
of gauze. Here are bottles of all sizes filled with coloured liquids
and basins of curious shapes and round shining boxes and square boxes
marked with blue labels, and here you are busy among your things. You
pile the blankets on his exhausted body. You fetch jugs of hot water
and boil the long curling rubber tubes in saucepans. You keep corking
and uncorking bottles.
Yes, I know that you understand all these things. You finger the glass
syringes exquisitely and pick up the fine needles easily with slender
pincers and with the glass beads poised neatly on your rosy finger tips
you saw them with tiny saws. You flaunt your perfect movements in the
face of his mysterious exhaustion. You show off the skilled movements
of your hands beside the erratic jerkings of his terrible limbs.
Why do you rub his grey flesh with the stained scrap of cotton and
stick the needle deep into his side? Why do you do it?
Death is inexorable and the place of death is void. You have crowded
the room with all manner of things. Why do you crowd all these things
up to the edge of the great emptiness?
You seem to have so much to do. Wait. Wait. A miracle is going to
happen. Death is coming into the room. There is no time for all this
business. There is only one moment between this man and eternity.
You still fuss about busily. You move your feet and rustle your
petticoats. You are continually doing things with your hands. You keep
on doing things. Why do you keep on doing things? Death is annoyed at
you fussing.
The man’s spirit is invisible. Why do you light the lamp? You cannot
see the God of Death with your splendid eyes. Does it please you to see
the sweat on that forehead and the glaze on the eyeballs?
Hush, you are making a noise. Why do you make a noise? No, as you say,
he cannot hear you, but cannot you hear? Eternity is soundless, but
hush! Let us listen. Let us listen. Maybe we shall hear the stirring of
wings or the sighing tremor of his soul passing.
Ah! What are you doing? Why do you move? You are filling the room with
sound as you have filled it with objects. You are annoying death with
your ridiculous things and the noise of your foolish business.
What do you say? He is dead? You say he is dead?
And here are all your things, your blankets and your bottles and your
basins. The blankets weigh down upon his body. They hang down over the
bed. Your syringes and your needles and your uncorked bottles are all
about in confusion. You have stained your fingers. There is a spot
on your white apron; but you are superb, and here are all your things
about you, all your queer things, all the confusion of your precious
things.
What have you and all your things to do with the dying of this man?
Nothing. Take them away.
IN THE OPERATING ROOM
The operating room is the section of a wooden shed. Thin partitions
separate it from the X-ray room on one side, and the sterilizing room
on the other. Another door communicates with a corridor. There are
three wounded men on three operating tables. Surgeons, nurses and
orderlies are working over them. The doors keep opening and shutting.
The boiler is pounding and bubbling in the sterilizing room. There
is a noise of steam escaping, of feet hurrying down the corridor, of
ambulances rolling past the windows, and behind all this, the rhythmic
pounding of the guns bombarding at a distance of ten miles or so.
1st Patient: Mother of God! Mother of God!
2nd Patient: Softly. Softly. You hurt me. Ah! You are hurting me.
3rd Patient: I am thirsty.
1st Surgeon: Cut the dressing, Mademoiselle.
2nd Surgeon: What’s his ticket say? Show it to me. What’s the X-ray
show?
3rd Surgeon: Abdomen. Bad pulse. I wonder now?
1st Patient: In the name of God be careful. I suffer. I suffer.
1st Surgeon: At what time were you wounded?
1st Patient: At five this morning.
1st Surgeon: Where?
1st Patient: In the arm.
1st Surgeon: Yes, yes, but in what sector?
1st Patient: In the trenches near Besanghe.
1st Surgeon: Shell or bullet?
1st Patient: Shell. Merciful God, what are you doing?
A nurse comes in from the corridor. Her apron is splashed with blood.
Nurse: There’s a lung just come in. Hæmorrhage. Can one of you take him?
1st Surgeon: In a few minutes. In five minutes. Now then, Mademoiselle,
strap down that other arm tighter.
Nurse (in doorway) to 2nd Surgeon: There’s a knee for you, doctor, and
three elbows. In five minutes I’ll send in the lung. (Exit.)
3rd Patient: I’m thirsty. A drink. Give me a drink.
3rd Surgeon: In a little while. You must wait a little.
2nd Patient: Mother of Jesus, not like that. Don’t turn my foot like
that. Not that way. Take care. Great God, take care! I can’t bear it. I
tell you, I can’t bear it!
2nd Surgeon: There, there, don’t excite yourself. You’ve got a nasty
leg, very nasty. Smells bad. Mademoiselle, hold his leg up. It’s not
pretty at all, this leg.
2nd Patient: Ah, doctor, doctor. What are you doing? Aiee----.
2nd Surgeon: Be quiet. Don’t move. Don’t touch the wound I tell you.
Idiot! Hold his leg. Keep your hands off, you animal. Hold his leg
higher. Strap his hands down.
3rd Patient (feebly): I am thirsty. I die of thirst. A drink! A drink!
2nd Patient (screaming): You’re killing me. Killing me! I’ll die of it!
Aieeeee----.
3rd Patient (softly): I am thirsty. For pity a drink.
3rd Surgeon: Have you vomited blood, old man?
3rd Patient: I don’t know. A drink please, doctor.
3rd Surgeon: Does it hurt here?
3rd Patient: No, I don’t think so. A drink, sister, in pity’s name, a
drink.
Nurse: I can’t give you a drink. It would hurt you. You are wounded in
the stomach.
3rd Patient: So thirsty. Just a little drink. Just a drop. Sister for
pity, just a drop.
3rd Surgeon: Moisten his lips. How long ago were you wounded?
3rd Patient: I don’t know. In the night. Some night.
3rd Surgeon: Last night?
3rd Patient: Perhaps last night. I don’t know. I lay in the mud a long
time. Please sister a drink. Just a little drink.
1st Patient: What’s in that bottle? What are you doing to me?
1st Surgeon: Keep still I tell you.
1st Patient: It burns! It’s burning me! No more. No more! I beg of
you, doctor; I can’t bear any more!
1st Surgeon: Nonsense. This won’t last a minute. There’s nothing the
matter with you. Your wounds are nothing.
1st Patient: You say it’s nothing. My God, what are you doing now?
Ai--ee!
1st Surgeon: It’s got to be cleaned out. There’s a piece of shell, bits
of coat, all manner of dirt in it.
2nd Patient: Jeanne, petite Marie, Jean, where are you? Little Jean,
where are you?
2nd Surgeon: Your leg is not at all pretty, my friend. We shall have to
take it off.
2nd Patient: Oh, my poor wife! I have three children, doctor. If you
take my leg off what will become of them and of the farm? Great God, to
suffer like this!
2nd Surgeon to 1st Surgeon: Look here a moment. It smells bad.
Gangrenous. What do you think?
1st Surgeon: No good waiting.
2nd Surgeon: Well, my friend, will you have it off?
2nd Patient: If you say so, doctor. Oh, my poor wife, my poor Jeanne.
What will become of you? The children are too little to work in the
fields.
2nd Surgeon (to nurse): Begin with the chloroform. We’re going to put
you to sleep, old man. Breathe deep. Breathe through the mouth. Is my
saw there? Where is my amputating saw? Who’s got my saw?
3rd Patient (softly): A drink, a drink. Give me a drink.
3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing with a pulse like that. Give him serum,
five hundred c.c.s and camphorated oil and strychnine. Warm him up a
bit.
Door opens, nurse enters, followed by two stretcher bearers.
Nurse: Here’s the lung. Are you ready for it?
1st Surgeon: In a minute. One minute. Leave him there.
The stretcher bearers put their stretcher on the floor and go out.
2nd Patient: (half under chloroform): Aha! Aha! Ahead there, you son of
a ----. Forward! Forward! What a stink! I’ve got him! Now I’ve got you.
Quick, quick! Let me go! Let me go! Jeannette, quick, quick, Jeannette!
I’m coming. Marie? Little Jean, where are you?
2nd Surgeon: Tighten those straps. He’s strong, poor devil.
1st Patient: Is it finished?
1st Surgeon: Very nearly. Keep quite still. Now then, the dressings
mademoiselle. There you are old man. Don’t bandage the arm too tight,
mademoiselle. Get him out now. Hi, stretcher bearers, lift up that one
from the floor, will you?
3rd Surgeon: It’s no use operating. Almost no pulse.
3rd Patient: For pity a drink!
3rd Surgeon: Give him a drink. It won’t matter. I can do nothing.
2nd Surgeon: I shall have to amputate above the knee. Is he under?
Nurse: Almost.
3rd Patient: For pity a drink.
Nurse: There, don’t lift your head; here is a drink. Drink this.
3rd Patient: It is good. Thank you, sister.
1st Surgeon: Take this man to Ward 3. Now then, mademoiselle, cut the
dressings.
3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing here. Send me the next one.
3rd Patient: I cannot see. I cannot see any more. Sister, where are you?
1st Surgeon: How’s your spine case of yesterday?
3rd Surgeon: Just what you would expect--paralysed from the waist down.
1st Surgeon: They say the attack is for five in the morning.
3rd Surgeon: Orders are to evacuate every possible bed to-day.
3rd Patient: It is dark. Are you there, sister?
Nurse: Yes, old man, I’m here. Shall I send for a priest, doctor?
3rd Surgeon: Too late. Poor devil. It’s hopeless when they come in like
that, after lying for hours in the mud. There, it’s finished. Call the
stretcher bearers.
1st Surgeon: Quick, a basin! God! How the blood spouts. Quick, quick,
quick! Three holes in this lung.
2nd Surgeon: Take that leg away, will you? There’s no room to move here.
3rd Surgeon: Take this dead man away, and bring the next abdomen. Wipe
that table, mademoiselle, while I wash my hands. And you, there, mop
up the floor a bit.
The doors open and shut. Stretcher bearers go out and come in. A
nurse comes from the sterilizing room with a pile of nickel drums
in her arms. Another nurse goes out with trays of knives and other
instruments. The nurse from the corridor comes back. An officer appears
at the window.
Nurse: Three knees have come in, two more abdomens, five heads.
Officer (through the window): The Médecin Inspecteur will be here in
half an hour. The General is coming at two to decorate all amputés.
1st Surgeon: We’ll get no lunch to-day, and I’m hungry. There, I call
that a very neat amputation.
2nd Surgeon: Three holes stopped in this lung in three minutes by the
clock. Pretty quick, eh?
3rd Surgeon: Give me a light, some one. My experience is that if
abdomens have to wait more than six hours it’s no good. You can’t do
anything. I hope that chap got the oysters in Amiens! Oysters sound
good to me.
BLIND
The door at the end of the baraque kept opening and shutting to let in
the stretcher bearers. As soon as it opened a crack the wind scurried
in and came hopping toward me across the bodies of the men that covered
the floor, nosing under the blankets, lifting the flaps of heavy coats,
and burrowing among the loose heaps of clothing and soiled bandages.
Then the grizzled head of a stretcher bearer would appear, butting its
way in, and he would emerge out of the black storm into the bright fog
that seemed to fill the place, dragging the stretcher after him, and
then the old one at the other end of the load would follow, and they
would come slowly down the centre of the hut looking for a clear place
on the floor.
The men were laid out in three rows on either side of the central
alley way. It was a big hut, and there were about sixty stretchers in
each row. There was space between the heads of one row and the feet
of another row, but no space to pass between the stretchers in the
same row; they touched. The old territorials who worked with me passed
up and down between the heads and feet. I had a squad of thirty of
these old orderlies and two sergeants and two priests, who were expert
dressers. Wooden screens screened off the end of the hut opposite
the entrance. Behind these were the two dressing tables where the
priests dressed the wounds of the new arrivals and got them ready for
the surgeons, after the old men had undressed them and washed their
feet. In one corner was my kitchen where I kept all my syringes and
hypodermic needles and stimulants.
It was just before midnight when the stretcher bearers brought in the
blind man, and there was no space on the floor anywhere; so they stood
waiting, not knowing what to do with him.
I said from the floor in the second row: “Just a minute, old ones.
You can put him here in a minute.” So they waited with the blind man
suspended in the bright, hot, misty air between them, like a pair
of old horses in shafts with their heads down, while the little boy
who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast.
Perhaps he thought the arms holding him when he jerked back and died
belonged to some woman I had never seen, some woman waiting somewhere
for news of him in some village, somewhere in France. How many women,
I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these
men who were lying on the floor? But I stopped thinking about this the
minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think. I didn’t as a rule,
but the boy’s very young voice had startled me. It had come through to
me as a real voice will sound sometimes through a dream, almost waking
you, but now it had stopped, and the dream was thick round me again,
and I laid him down, covered his face with the brown blanket, and
called two other old ones.
“Put this one in the corridor to make more room here,” I said; and
I saw them lift him up. When they had taken him away, the stretcher
bearers who had been waiting brought the blind one and put him down in
the cleared space. They had to come round to the end of the front row
and down between the row of feet and row of heads; they had to be very
careful where they stepped; they had to lower the stretcher cautiously
so as not to jostle the men on either side (there was just room), but
these paid no attention. None of the men lying packed together on the
floor noticed each other in this curious dreamplace.
I had watched this out of the corner of my eye, busy with something
that was not very like a man. The limbs seemed to be held together only
by the strong stuff of the uniform. The head was unrecognisable. It
was a monstrous thing, and a dreadful rattling sound came from it. I
looked up and saw the chief surgeon standing over me. I don’t know how
he got there. His small shrunken face was wet and white; his eyes were
brilliant and feverish; his incredible hands that saved so many men so
exquisitely, so quickly, were in the pockets of his white coat.
“Give him morphine,” he said, “a double dose. As much as you like.” He
pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. “In cases like this, if I am not
about, give morphine; enough, you understand.” Then he vanished like a
ghost. He went back to his operating room, a small white figure with
round shoulders, a magician, who performed miracles with knives. He
went away through the dream.
I gave the morphine, then crawled over and looked at the blind man’s
ticket. I did not know, of course, that he was blind until I read his
ticket. A large round white helmet covered the top half of his head and
face; only his nostrils and mouth and chin were uncovered. The surgeon
in the dressing station behind the trenches had written on his ticket,
“Shot through the eyes. Blind.”
Did he know? I asked myself. No, he couldn’t know yet. He would still
be wondering, waiting, hoping, down there in that deep, dark silence of
his, in his own dark personal world. He didn’t know he was blind; no
one would have told him. I felt his pulse. It was strong and steady.
He was a long, thin man, but his body was not very cold and the pale
lower half of his clear-cut face was not very pale. There was something
beautiful about him. In his case there was no hurry, no necessity to
rush him through to the operating room. There was plenty of time. He
would always be blind.
One of the orderlies was going up and down with hot tea in a bucket. I
beckoned to him.
I said to the blind one: “Here is a drink.” He didn’t hear me, so I
said it more loudly against the bandage, and helped him lift his head,
and held the tin cup to his mouth below the thick edge of the bandage.
I did not think then of what was hidden under the bandage. I think of
it now. Another head case across the hut had thrown off his blanket and
risen from his stretcher. He was standing stark naked except for his
head bandage, in the middle of the hut, and was haranguing the crowd in
a loud voice with the gestures of a political orator. But the crowd,
lying on the floor, paid no attention to him. They did not notice him.
I called to Gustave and Pierre to go to him.
The blind man said to me: “Thank you, sister, you are very kind. That
is good. I thank you.” He had a beautiful voice. I noticed the great
courtesy of his speech. But they were all courteous. Their courtesy
when they died, their reluctance to cause me any trouble by dying or
suffering, was one of the things it didn’t do to think about.
Then I left him, and presently forgot that he was there waiting in the
second row of stretchers on the left side of the long crowded floor.
Gustave and Pierre had got the naked orator back on to his stretcher
and were wrapping him up again in his blankets. I let them deal with
him and went back to my kitchen at the other end of the hut, where
my syringes and hypodermic needles were boiling in saucepans. I had
received by post that same morning a dozen beautiful new platinum
needles. I was very pleased with them. I said to one of the dressers
as I fixed a needle on my syringe and held it up, squirting the liquid
through it; “Look. I’ve some lovely new needles.” He said: “Come and
help me a moment. Just cut this bandage, please.” I went over to his
dressing-table. He darted off to a voice that was shrieking somewhere.
There was a man stretched on the table. His brain came off in my hands
when I lifted the bandage from his head.
When the dresser came back I said: “His brain came off on the bandage.”
“Where have you put it?”
“I put it in the pail under the table.”
“It’s only one half of his brain,” he said, looking into the man’s
skull. “The rest is here.”
I left him to finish the dressing and went about my own business. I had
much to do.
It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in
from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the
operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from
the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was
ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some
there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes. It was my
business to create a counter-wave of life, to create the flow against
the ebb. It was like a tug of war with the tide. The ebb of life was
cold. When life was ebbing the man was cold; when it began to flow
back, he grew warm. It was all, you see, like a dream. The dying men
on the floor were drowned men cast up on the beach, and there was the
ebb of life pouring away over them, sucking them away, an invisible
tide; and my old orderlies, like old sea-salts out of a lifeboat, were
working to save them. I had to watch, to see if they were slipping,
being dragged away. If a man were slipping quickly, being sucked
down rapidly, I sent runners to the operating rooms. There were six
operating rooms on either side of my hut. Medical students in white
coats hurried back and forth along the covered corridors between us. It
was my business to know which of the wounded could wait and which could
not. I had to decide for myself. There was no one to tell me. If I made
any mistakes, some would die on their stretchers on the floor under my
eyes who need not have died. I didn’t worry. I didn’t think. I was too
busy, too absorbed in what I was doing. I had to judge from what was
written on their tickets and from the way they looked and the way they
felt to my hand. My hand could tell of itself one kind of cold from
another. They were all half-frozen when they arrived, but the chill
of their icy flesh wasn’t the same as the cold inside them when life
was almost ebbed away. My hands could instantly tell the difference
between the cold of the harsh bitter night and the stealthy cold of
death. Then there was another thing, a small fluttering thing. I didn’t
think about it or count it. My fingers felt it. I was in a dream, led
this way and that by my cute eyes and hands that did many things, and
seemed to know what to do.
Sometimes there was no time to read the ticket or touch the pulse. The
door kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers whatever
I was doing. I could not watch when I was giving piqures; but, standing
by my table filling a syringe, I could look down over the rough forms
that covered the floor and pick out at a distance this one and that
one. I had been doing this for two years, and had learned to read the
signs. I could tell from the way they twitched, from the peculiar shade
of a pallid face, from the look of tight pinched-in nostrils, and in
other ways which I could not have explained, that this or that one was
slipping over the edge of the beach of life. Then I would go quickly
with my long saline needles, or short thick camphor oil needles, and
send one of the old ones hurrying along the corridor to the operating
rooms. But sometimes there was no need to hurry; sometimes I was too
late; with some there was no longer any question of the ebb and flow of
life and death; there was nothing to do.
The hospital throbbed and hummed that night like a dynamo. The
operating rooms were ablaze; twelve surgical équipes were at work;
boilers steamed and whistled; nurses hurried in and out of the
sterilizing rooms carrying big shining metal boxes and enamelled trays;
feet were running, slower feet shuffling. The hospital was going full
steam ahead. I had a sense of great power, exhilaration and excitement.
A loud wind was howling. It was throwing itself like a pack of wolves
against the flimsy wooden walls, and the guns were growling. Their
voices were dying away. I thought of them as a pack of beaten dogs,
slinking away across the dark waste where the dead were lying and the
wounded who had not yet been picked up, their only cover the windy
blanket of the bitter November night.
And I was happy. It seemed to me that the crazy crowded bright
hot shelter was a beautiful place. I thought, “This is the second
battlefield. The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of
these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real
enemies.” And I thought of the chief surgeon, the wizard working like
lightning through the night, and all the others wielding their flashing
knives against the invisible enemy. The wounded had begun to arrive at
noon. It was now past midnight, and the door kept opening and shutting
to let in the stretcher-bearers, and the ambulances kept lurching in
at the gate. Lanterns were moving through the windy dark from shed to
shed. The nurses were out there in the scattered huts, putting the men
to bed when they came over the dark ground, asleep, from the operating
rooms. They would wake up in clean warm beds--those who did wake up.
“We will send you the dying, the desperate, the moribund,” the
Inspector-General had said. “You must expect a thirty per cent.
mortality.” So we had got ready for it; we had organised to dispute
that figure.