"We have to do what we can with them," the doctor said, standing by the
desk and turning over some papers. "We just about live in them, you
know."
"This, of course," he explained, "is only a short trip, comparatively.
Sometimes they are rather bad."
"Anything can happen, you know. Now, there was a man we had last
night--we knew it was a serious case, yes. An amputation--only just got
him off the train in time. There wasn't anything to be done. He died
an hour after." The doctor sat in the corner of the couch, facing me,
looking out of the window where the gray smoke from the engine whirled
against it. "I've never had a man die on board," he said slowly. "But
there are times----" he hesitated, waited a little, then shook his
head. "Yes, there are bad times," he murmured.
He leaned back, took up the book beside him, closed it and placed
it on the desk. His khaki tunic and braided sleeves, with their
three small stars, showed very dark against the gentian cushions.
"It's the responsibility," he said, the even, meditative tone of
his voice carrying quite clearly in the curious stillness, "and the
uncertainty--the fact that you don't know. Anything can happen....
"There was the night they stopped us and told us about the
Zeppelins.... That was the second time my train had been bombed--there
was another night, but that wasn't very bad. But this night the
train was filled up, all cot cases, two amputations, possibility of
hemorrhage. And what are you going to do? You have to get them to the
hospitals. So we went ahead....
"They were dropping them pretty thick that night--oh, yes, we saw it
all right. Quite a thing to see, that!"
Then he smiled, that friendly Scotch doctor, smiled and fumbled with
the black cord of his eyeglasses which had caught on the button of his
shoulder strap. "Pretty show it would have been," he announced, with a
certain gentle causticity, "if they had hit us."
Then he stood up abruptly, waited for a moment to look out the window
where the broad fields were wheeling past in great squares of color,
and said: "There are one or two serious cases to-night. We'll go back
now."
And he walked down and opened the door beside the closed desk. I saw
before me a little narrow vestibule with mahogany walls. I stepped into
this vestibule, one short step carried me across the threshold; but in
this moment I entered a wholly new world. It was, in absolute truth, a
world complete, self-sustained; there was not even the illusion of its
having any concern whatever with what was not contained within itself.
It was war.
There were, in certain cupboards and certain little rooms opening off
the corridor, bandages, gauze, linen, instruments, medicines. There
was, too, a compartment of some proportions where a man at a typewriter
was making up the nominal roll. Also, in this extraordinary world of
war there was a kitchen; the cook asked me in to show me the generous
pots of broth simmering on his stoves. But it was the dressing room,
with its enameled operating table and its brilliant overhead light,
which was the axis of this compact and infinitely tidy little universe.
It was in this room, this room built in a train, that it had been
decided whether or not men were to live or die.
"Yes, it's a bit difficult--operating here," the doctor admitted. "What
with the motion of the train and all." But he added hastily that it was
not on board ambulance trains that the true miracles of science and of
medicine had come. It was in the dressing stations, in the casualty
clearing stations, in shabby little rooms under shell fire, where the
light was a lamp or a candle or anything, where water itself was at a
premium. "Nobody believed," the doctor said, "that surgeons could do
what _they_ have done."
Then we went down a very narrow corridor and, quite suddenly, I found
that we had entered the first coach filled with wounded men. It was
deep and narrow, with a white, concave roof. But it was above all a
very long coach, and running the full length of it were two double
tiers of cots. The aisle between these tiers was of good width and
miraculously clean. The cots were wide, with thick mattresses.
In each of these cots a man was lying. They were lying as if they were
asleep, with their faces turned away from the light. The coach was very
still.
I walked down the aisle, following the doctor. I was afraid of the
movement of the train throwing me against one of those white cots
where those curious, inert, motionless things were. But the doctor was
hurrying along quite briskly, and explaining to me the amazing new
diseases of this war, talking in a low, veiled, professional tone and
looking at his patients each one, as we passed by.
"There's, of course, shell shocks," he said. "General collapse. Nerves
simply give way--can't stand it. The wear and the strain, and the
noise, the horror and the rest of it----"
"They come home like this----" We had stepped by one of the cots where
a man was lying with his face turned straight toward the light. His
eyes were closed, his thin, nerveless hands lay, palms upward, on the
gray blanket. The slender veins in his wrists showed very clear.
"He's been like that perhaps for days," the doctor said. "Doesn't see,
doesn't hear, doesn't feel. Absolutely unconscious. Total collapse.
"Yes, oh, yes, he'll be all right. It's just time, you know. Time
and care and patience. Like any other shock--only ten thousand times
greater. It's wonderful to see how their memory comes back, slowly,
slowly.... You wouldn't believe what man can live through. You
wouldn't believe it--it's only flesh and bone, after all, you know.
"Then there's this thing of trench feet--pretty bad that. Slow rot.
Wholly new disease. And for that matter, there are plenty of them--not
yet even named, some of them. But, of course, it's mostly shrapnel.
Shrapnel and amazing things...."
And so, like this, we passed through coach after coach--ninety-five
wounded men there were on board. And the doctor was stopping every few
steps to look at a dressing or to ask a question. And I was walking
behind him, filled with wonder and amazement. I had not known it was
like this--the getting wounded men back from war. They were so patient
and so pitiful and so happy. And I think that they, too, were sometimes
filled with wonder.
For when I stopped to talk to them they said always that it was a
miracle, a miracle being on that train.
"I never knew I was goin' to be 'ere," a Tommy told me. He was lying,
both of his bandaged feet propped up at the foot of his cot. "They got
me in both legs," he explained. "Fair an' square. Shrapnel. Two days
I was lyin' out. Two days. No, you wouldn't believe--an' I wouldn't
either, hadn't I done it. Frightful it was. H. E. spatterin' 'round
everywhere. They were rippin' things open, them two days. Oh, I was
sorter goin' out o' me mind toward the end of it.... Don't know where
I'd got to--we was pushin' on. Down I went. Down I stayed. Wasn't no
good tryin' to crawl.... Yes, I was a bit out o' me mind, thinkin' all
sort-a things out there. Two days, an' a night of it thrown in. 'In the
legs I'm 'it,' I said to meself. 'Wish they'd blowed off me arms....
_I'm_ done,' I said. But remember 'em gettin' me hout. Two days I'd
'ad. Two days in 'ell.
"Then I was put in a barn, full up it was, an' they went an' strafed
that. Busted out a whole side of 'er. Saw 'er cavin' in--frightful
noise. 'That's crocked up,' I said.
"An' now I'm 'ere--'ere in a train. It's 'eaven, I call it." ...