and on top of these, galvanised iron cauldrons of boiling water were
steaming. We had driven nails all the way down the wooden posts that
held up the roof and festooned the posts with red rubber hot-water
bottles. In the corner near to my kitchen we had partitioned off a
cubicle, where we built a light bed, a rough wooden frame lined with
electric light bulbs, where a man could be cooked back to life again.
My own kitchen was an arrangement of shelves for saucepans and syringes
and needles of different sizes, and cardboard boxes full of ampoules
of camphor oil and strychnine and caffeine and morphine, and large
ampoules of sterilized salt and water, and dozens of beautiful sharp
shining needles were always on the boil.
It wasn’t much to look at, this reception hut. It was about as
attractive as a goods yard in a railway station, but we were very proud
of it, my old ones and I. We had got it ready, and it was good enough
for us. We could revive the cold dead there; snatch back the men who
were slipping over the edge; hoist them out of the dark abyss into
life again. And because our mortality at the end of three months was
only nineteen per cent, not thirty, well it was the most beautiful
place in the world to me and my old grizzled Pépères, Gaston and Pierre
and Leroux and the others were to me like shining archangels. But I
didn’t think about this. I think of it now. I only knew it then, and
was happy. Yes, I was happy there.
Looking back, I do not understand that woman--myself--standing in that
confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The
place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick
with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood. The men lay
in their stiff uniforms that were caked with mud and dried blood, their
great boots on their feet; stained bandages showing where a trouser
leg or a sleeve had been cut away. Their faces gleamed faintly, with
a faint phosphorescence. Some who could not breathe lying down were
propped up on their stretchers against the wall, but most were prone on
their backs, staring at the steep iron roof.
The old orderlies moved from one stretcher to another, carefully,
among the piles of clothing, boots and blood-soaked bandages--careful
not to step on a hand or a sprawling twisted foot. They carried zinc
pails of hot water and slabs of yellow soap and scrubbing brushes.
They gathered up the heaps of clothing, and made little bundles of the
small things out of pockets, or knelt humbly, washing the big yellow
stinking feet that protruded from under the brown blankets. It was the
business of these old ones to undress the wounded, wash them, wrap them
in blankets, and put hot-water bottles at their feet and sides. It was
a difficult business peeling the stiff uniform from a man whose hip
or shoulder was fractured, but the old ones were careful. Their big
peasant hands were gentle--very, very gentle and careful. They handled
the wounded men as if they were children. Now, looking back, I see
their rough powerful visages, their shaggy eye-brows, their big clumsy,
gentle hands. I see them go down on their stiff knees; I hear their
shuffling feet and their soft gruff voices answering the voices of the
wounded, who are calling to them for drinks, or to God for mercy.
The old ones had orders from the commandant not to cut the good cloth
of the uniforms if they could help it, but they had orders from me not
to hurt the men, and they obeyed me. They slit up the heavy trousers
and slashed across the stiff tunics with long scissors, and pulled very
slowly, very carefully at the heavy boots, and the wounded men did not
groan or cry out very much. They were mostly very quiet. When they did
cry out they usually apologised for the annoyance of their agony. Only
now and then a wind of pain would sweep over the floor, tossing the
legs and arms, then subside again.
I think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance, or under some
horrid spell. Her feet are lumps of fire, her face is clammy, her
apron is splashed with blood; but she moves ceaselessly about with
bright burning eyes and handles the dreadful wreckage of men as if in
a dream. She does not seem to notice the wounds or the blood. Her eyes
seem to be watching something that comes and goes and darts in and
out among the prone bodies. Her eyes and her hands and her ears are
alert, intent on the unseen thing that scurries and hides and jumps
out of the corner on to the face of a man when she’s not looking. But
quick, something makes her turn. Quick, she is over there, on her knees
fighting the thing off, driving it away, and now it’s got another
victim. It’s like a dreadful game of hide and seek among the wounded.
All her faculties are intent on it. The other things that are going on,
she deals with automatically.
There is a constant coming and going. Medical students run in and out.
“What have you got ready?”
“I’ve got three knees, two spines, five abdomens, twelve heads. Here’s
a lung case--hæmorrhage. He can’t wait.” She is binding the man’s
chest; she doesn’t look up.
“Send him along.”
“Pierre! Gaston! Call the stretcher-bearers to take the lung to
Monsieur D----.” She fastens the tight bandage, tucks the blanket
quickly round the thin shoulders. The old men lift him. She hurries
back to her saucepans to get a new needle.
A surgeon appears.
“Where’s that knee of mine? I left it in the saucepan on the window
ledge. I had boiled it up for an experiment.”
“One of the orderlies must have taken it,” she says, putting her old
needle on to boil.
“Good God! Did he mistake it?”
“Jean, did you take a saucepan you found on the windowsill?”
“Yes, sister, I took it. I thought it was for the casse crôute; it
looked like a ragout of mouton. I have it here.”
“Well, it was lucky he didn’t eat it. It was a knee I had cut out, you
know.”
It is time for the old ones “casse crôute.” It is after one o’clock.
At one o’clock the orderlies have cups of coffee and chunks of bread
and meat. They eat their supper gathered round the stoves where the
iron cauldrons are boiling. The surgeons and the sisters attached to
the operating rooms are drinking coffee too in the sterilizing rooms.
I do not want any supper. I am not hungry. I am not tired. I am busy.
My eyes are busy and my fingers. I am conscious of nothing about myself
but my eyes, hands and feet. My feet are a nuisance, they are swollen,
hurting lumps, but my fingers are perfectly satisfactory. They are
expert in the handling of frail glass ampoules and syringes and
needles. I go from one man to another jabbing the sharp needles into
their sides, rubbing their skins with iodine, and each time I pick my
way back across their bodies to fetch a fresh needle I scan the surface
of the floor where the men are spread like a carpet, for signs, for my
special secret signals of death.
“Aha! I’ll catch you out again.” Quick, to that one. That jerking!
That sudden livid hue spreading over his form. “Quick, Emile! Pierre!”
I have lifted the blanket. The blood is pouring out on the floor
under the stretcher. “Get the tourniquet. Hold his leg up. Now then,
tight--tighter. Now call the stretcher bearers.”
Someone near is having a fit. Is it epilepsy? I don’t know. His mouth
is frothy. His eyes are rolling. He tries to fling himself on the
floor. He falls with a thud across his neighbour, who does not notice.
The man just beyond propped up against the wall, watches as if from a
great distance. He has a gentle patient face; this spectacle does not
concern him.
The door keeps opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers.
The wounded are carried in at the end door and are carried out to the
operating rooms at either side. The sergeant is counting the treasures
out of a dead man’s pockets. He is tying his little things, his
letters and briquet, etc., up in a handkerchief. Some of the old ones
are munching their bread and meat in the centre of the hut under the
electric light. The others are busy with their pails and scissors. They
shuffle about, kneeling, scrubbing, filling hotwater bottles. I see it
all through a mist. It is misty but eternal. It is a scene in eternity,
in some strange dream-hell where I am glad to be employed, where I
belong, where I am happy. How crowded together we are here. How close
we are in this nightmare. The wounded are packed into this place like
sardines, and we are so close to them, my old ones and I. I’ve never
been so close before to human beings. We are locked together, the old
ones and I, and the wounded men; we are bound together. We all feel it.
We all know it. The same thing is throbbing in us, the single thing,
the one life. We are one body, suffering and bleeding. It is a kind of
bliss to me to feel this. I am a little delirious, but my head is cool
enough, it seems to me.
“No, not that one. He can wait. Take the next one to Monsieur D----,
and this one to Monsieur Guy, and this one to Monsieur Robert. We will
put this one on the electric light bed; he has no pulse. More hot-water
bottles here, Gaston.
“Do you feel cold, mon vieux?”
“Yes, I think so, but pray do not trouble.”
I go with him into the little cubicle, turn on the light bulbs, leave
him to cook there; and as I come out again to face the strange heaving
dream, I suddenly hear a voice calling me, a new far-away hollow voice.
“Sister! My sister! Where are you?”
I am startled. It sounds so far away, so hollow and so sweet. It sounds
like a bell high up in the mountains. I do not know where it comes
from. I look down over the rows of men lying on their backs, one close
to the other, packed together on the floor, and I cannot tell where the
voice comes from. Then I hear it again.
“Sister! Oh, my sister, where are you?”
A lost voice. The voice of a lost man, wandering in the mountains, in
the night. It is the blind man calling. I had forgotten him. I had
forgotten that he was there. He could wait. The others could not wait.
So I had left him and forgotten him.
Something in his voice made me run, made my heart miss a beat. I ran
down the centre alley way, round and up again, between the two rows,
quickly, carefully stepping across to him over the stretchers that
separated us. He was in the second row. I could just squeeze through to
him.
“I am coming,” I called to him. “I am coming.”
I knelt beside him. “I am here,” I said; but he lay quite still on his
back; he didn’t move at all; he hadn’t heard me. So I took his hand
and put my mouth close to his bandaged head and called to him with
desperate entreaty.
“I am here. What is it? What is the matter?”
He didn’t move even then, but he gave a long shuddering sigh of relief.
“I thought I had been abandoned here, all alone,” he said softly in his
far-away voice.
I seemed to awake then. I looked round me and began to tremble, as
one would tremble if one awoke with one’s head over the edge of a
precipice. I saw the wounded packed round us, hemming us in. I saw his
comrades, thick round him, and the old ones shuffling about, working
and munching their hunks of bread, and the door opening to let in the
stretcher bearers. The light poured down on the rows of faces. They
gleamed faintly. Four hundred faces were staring up at the roof, side
by side. The blind man didn’t know. He thought he was alone, out in the
dark. That was the precipice, that reality.
“You are not alone,” I lied. “There are many of your comrades here, and
I am here, and there are doctors and nurses. You are with friends here,
not alone.”
“I thought,” he murmured in that far-away voice, “that you had gone
away and forgotten me, and that I was abandoned here alone.”
My body rattled and jerked like a machine out of order. I was awake
now, and I seemed to be breaking to pieces.
“No,” I managed to lie again. “I had not forgotten you, nor left you
alone.” And I looked down again at the visible half of his face and saw
that his lips were smiling.
At that I fled from him. I ran down the long, dreadful hut and hid
behind my screen and cowered, sobbing, in a corner, hiding my face.
The old ones were very troubled. They didn’t know what to do. Presently
I heard them whispering:
“She is tired,” one said.
“Yes, she is tired.”
“She should go off to bed,” another said.
“We will manage somehow without her,” they said.
Then one of them timidly stuck a grizzled head round the corner of the
screen. He held his tin cup in his hands. It was full of hot coffee. He
held it out, offering it to me. He didn’t know of anything else that he
could do for me.
THE PRIEST AND THE RABBI
The General came one morning after the big attack, to visit the
hospital. He went through all the huts, stopping beside each bed to
speak to the wounded, and he decorated every man who had lost a leg
or an arm with the Medaille Militaire. It was a short ceremony. The
General stood at the foot of the bed and recited quickly the military
formula citing the man for bravery in the field, and he raised his
sword and saluted the wounded man; then he pinned the medal on his
nightshirt, and, leaning over him, kissed him on both cheeks. When he
rose and moved on down the ward, “the amputé” found an envelope on his
coverlet with a hundred francs in it. The General, so they said, gave
all his pay to the men in this way.
He admired the white coverlets with their gay patterns of pink or red
flowers. He had a stony face and his eyes were like bits of blue
steel; but he congratulated us on the gay appearance of our huts. He
said, looking out of the door at the bare ground, the ugly sheds,
and the artillery rattling down the road past the flimsy gate of the
hospital, that to awake after a battle in a clean bed, dressed in a
pink nightshirt and with a white coverlet with pink roses on it spread
over your feet, must be like waking in Paradise.
I said, following him from bed to bed, that the coverlets came from
Selfridges and cost two shillings apiece, and I thought they were worth
it. They even, I said, made the difference sometimes between a man’s
slipping away or back into the world when he awoke.
The General did not have very much time. All the beds were full. He
couldn’t stop to talk to each man for more than half a minute, but
when he came to No. 11 in Mademoiselle de M----’s ward and saw the
ugly, scarred, black, burnt-up face grinning on the pillow and the eyes
twinkling so astonishingly under the singed eyebrows, he seemed very
taken aback.
“What’s the matter with his face?” he asked me in a low tone. “It’s a
cinder! Why is he so jolly?”
“The shell burst so near that he was burnt. All his skin is burnt
black, you see. Both arms are broken, and both legs. He is wounded all
over his body. God knows why he is so jolly.”
There was very little to be seen of the man but his merry, burnt,
scarred face. The cradle over his broken legs hid him from view till
you got round it close to his pillow. His arms were in splints, and
were supported by pulleys attached to a scaffolding over his bed.
He couldn’t move any part of himself but his head. He grinned up at
us and began to talk in his rough patois that was very difficult to
understand. He was a great talker, was No. 11. He must have been the
wag of his village. He came from somewhere near Nantes. He had a very
strong accent and a rough rollicking comical voice that bubbled out of
him in a stream in answer to the General’s enquiry as to how he felt.
The General listened, fascinated and puzzled. “What does he say?” he
asked me.
“He says he feels fine, except for his legs and arms. He says he’s in
fine shape. He says if he hadn’t had to wait on the battlefield for
four days and nights his wounds would be nothing. He was lost, he said,
in No Man’s Land, and had to crawl along on his stomach, and it was a
slow business because his legs and arms were broken. He hitched himself
along somehow on his stomach, but it was a slow way of travelling. He
says he had to lie quiet in the daytime, and could only crawl along at
night, and he didn’t know which way to make for. He said the men were
lying out there as thick as flies, but the stretcher-bearers didn’t
come his way, so he is lucky to be here. He says he’s always lucky,
always has been.”
The bright laughing eyes in the burnt-up face watched me while I
explained. When I paused he began to talk again.
“What’s he saying now?” asked the General. “He seems to think it is all
a good joke.”
“He says when he woke up here and saw the pink roses on his bedspread
he thought he was in Heaven, and then he felt a great hunger, and knew
he was alive, and that his luck was good; a miracle had happened. He
says the priest at home told him about miracles, and he always poked
fun at him.”
The General was evidently intrigued, but he hadn’t much time. “Four
days and four nights out there! I congratulate you, mon vieux.” He
turned reluctantly to go.
“One minute, mon General, one minute. I saw something, a little thing.
I would like to tell you what I saw out there on the battlefield.”
The General turned, came back again past the mountain of bedclothes
and looked down with his steel-blue eyes into the ugly blackened face.
“Tell me,” he said, “what did you see?” The General might possibly have
looked in that way at a beautiful woman whom he loved very tenderly in
the secret depths of his stone heart. His eyes were fixed intently,
questioningly, wistfully, on the ugly visage with its incredible
jollity. “What was it you saw, mon vieux, quick--tell me.”
“It was like this. There were men dying out there and there were
priests on their knees going from one to the other. It was early
morning, just after sunrise, and the Boche were shelling again.
Every now and then a shell would fall and a shower of shrapnel, and
pht--some poor devil would stop groaning. I wasn’t dying, you see,
so I didn’t call to the priests. I’d been crawling along in the dark
during the night, but now in the light I lay still, pretending I was
dead, because of the sniping. There was a man dying a little way off,
and a priest was kneeling, holding up a crucifix in front of him, and
a little further off there was another man dying, who was a Jew, and
the Rabbi of his regiment was kneeling beside him; and just then, when
I watched, I saw the priest fall forward on the ground, on his face,
with the crucifix in his hands. The Rabbi saw it, too. His man was just
dead, and he saw that the priest had been hit in the back. He looked
over his shoulder, you see, when the shell exploded. Then he crawled
over on his hands and knees to where the priest was lying and took the
crucifix out of his hands and knelt just where the priest had been
kneeling, and held up the crucifix in front of the eyes of the man, the
good Catholic who was dying; and he didn’t know the difference, you
see; and so he died, not noticing the priest was dead and the Rabbi
was in his place--only seeing the crucifix.”
There was a silence. The General drew himself up and turned away,
staring out of the window. Two stretcher-bearers were passing, carrying
a tightly rolled bundle to the morgue. I did not try to see the
General’s face. The man in the bed was smiling.
“Lucky for him, wasn’t it?” he said to me. “I’ll tell the priest in my
village when I get home, and I’ll tell him about the coverlet with the
pink roses. Maybe the wife could get one like it.”
“They come from Selfridges,” I said. “They cost five francs. I’ll send
you one when the war is over.”
THE TWO GUNNERS
They were very big men. They must have stood six feet three or four in
their socks, but, of course, I never saw them standing up. I only saw
them horizontal, carried in on stretchers, flat on their backs. One of
them I saw next morning in his bed, the other one I only saw on his
stretcher in the receiving hut. He was carried away, was never put into
a bed. I knew I would never see him again. His pal knew it, too.
It was a mistake their coming to us. The English were co-operating
with the French in the attack, and these two had been picked up in the
confusion by a French ambulance. I remember how surprised I was when I
saw the khaki uniforms. It was the same night that the blind man came
in, or, to be exact, it was toward morning of the same day.
The hut was still crowded with wounded. The door still kept opening
and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers. We seemed to be making
no headway. The men came in as fast as we could despatch them to the
operating rooms. Would there never be an end to it? Would the sound
of the ambulances lurching in at the gate never stop? What, I asked
myself, was the toll of this last failure to break the German line?
How many men had passed through my hands during the last thirty-six
hours? I did not know. I had not tried to count them. They were carried
in and carried out, and they were always there--the same ones, it
seemed to me--suffering the same pain, with the same wounds gaping,
the same blood pouring out of them. Cold--they were all so cold--half
frozen--and we warmed them, thawed them back to life; and yet there
they were, still so cold, still wrapped in cold death; and the dying
were still dying, and they were all so courteous about it. They all
spoke with such courteous voices, using such beautiful phrases, as
if they were in my drawing-room. They apologised gravely in their
exhaustion for the dirt, the blood, the ugly wounds.
“Do not trouble, sister. Do not give yourself so much trouble, I beg of
you.”
“I am sorry, Madame, my bandage is leaking. I would not trouble you,
but I think I am bleeding.”
“I beg your pardon. No, it is not too bad; no, not unbearable. I
didn’t mean to do that. A thousand pardons. It is nothing. Yes, I am
comfortable now--quite comfortable. Do not trouble yourself in the
least, Madame.”
Most of them were peasants. The French, I realised, were a nation of
peasants. But how was it that, even in their agony, they spoke so
beautifully, had such perfect manners, chose such pleasant words;
and even when they lay there waiting hour after hour, getting weaker
and weaker, that their small thin dying voices, scarcely more than
whispers, still kept that note of elegance?
“Yes, I am a little tired, Madame, but it is of no consequence, I
assure you.”
“That I should die while I wait here is a mere trifle that you must not
allow to disturb you,” was what they seemed to be saying to me.
I was so accustomed to this elegance of mind among my poilus that I
no longer noticed it. I took it for granted. I did not think about it
until the two British Gunners came in. Then suddenly I realised that
there are two types of courage, the British and the French, as there
are two types of men.
The Gunners were pals. They lay side by side staring at the roof. If
they were pleasantly surprised to find an English nurse in this barn of
a place, they gave no sign of it. Even the red-faced one, who sat up
leaning on his elbow when I approached, took me for granted. The other
one lay motionless; his face was grey and damp. Neither of them spoke
while I looked at their tickets. The red-faced giant was wounded in the
leg, otherwise there was nothing wrong with him; the other was wounded
in the abdomen; it was clear that there was no hope for him. I would
send him through at once to Rouviere. He would save him if he could be
saved, but I knew it was useless. I knelt beside him, looking at his
ticket. His name was written on it, and the name of his regiment. I do
not remember his name, but he came from somewhere in Lancashire. I was
wondering whether I should ask him his address and offer to write to
his family. Something in my attitude as I knelt there seemed to strike
him. He turned his head ever so slightly toward me, and asked, “Is it
serious, sister?”
“Yes,” I answered, “it is serious. You are wounded in the stomach. That
is always very serious.”
For a moment he stared into my eyes, then he turned his head away
again, shutting me out. I was dismissed, he had nothing to say to me.
I rose to my feet and looked from one to the other. But just as I was
moving away, the dying one turned his head again and looked across at
his pal. There was a dumb interchange of some sort between them, then
the red giant spoke.
“Stick it,” he said. That was all he said. They didn’t talk any more;
they had nothing more to say to each other. A few minutes later the
stretcher-bearers carried the Gunner, who was wounded in the abdomen,
away to the operating room. He died under the anæsthetic. His pal
didn’t see him again. I don’t know where they took him or where he was
buried or where his home was. The other Gunner didn’t tell me. He
didn’t ask me anything about his friend.
I found him the next day in one of the wards sitting up in bed eating
his dinner. He didn’t say anything when he saw me. He looked very fit
and very big, and he seemed to have a good appetite. There was no
expression of any kind on his face.
I said, “Good morning. How are you?”
He answered something. I couldn’t understand what he said, so I asked
him again, saying, “I didn’t quite catch what you said.”
“A1 at Lloyd’s, Madam,” he repeated. That was what he had said.