help which could be given her was to come from twenty men, absolutely
unassorted--such a score as you would gather by walking down any street
and picking up the first twenty men you met. There were several
farm-laborers, a barber, an accountant, miscellaneous factory hands.
The only person remotely approaching a nurse was a man who had had the
training for a pharmacist, but as he had never been able to stay sober
long enough to take his examinations, you may not be surprised that he
was the least useful of them all.
These twenty casually selected human beings went unwillingly up the
hill toward the barracks, ironic, mocking, lazy, indifferent, as human
beings unelectrified by purpose are apt to be. But, although they did
not know it, there marched at their head an iron will, a steel-like
purpose, and an intelligence which was invincible. They took this to
be but a smallish, youngish woman in uniform, and were all in great
guffaws at the comic idea of being under her orders.
Of course, to begin with, she did not know one of her men from another,
but she studied them closely as they worked, driven along by her
direction, setting up the rough camp-stoves, stopping the worst of the
holes in the walls, arranging the poor apologies for mattresses, and
cutting off the tops of gasoline-cans for heating water--for our woman
doctor was asked to take care of several hundred typhoid cases and was
not provided with so much as a bowl that would hold water. Presently,
as they worked, she noticed that there were but nineteen men there. All
day she studied their faces, their bearing, what was written on them
for the seeing eye to read. At night, at supper-time, there were twenty
men. Those clear brown eyes swept around the circle and pounced on a
mild-looking _poilu_ innocently taking his soup with the others.
“Where have you been all day?” she asked him.
He fairly turned pale with astonishment, “Why, how did you--? I’ve been
right here, working!” he tried to bluster her down.
“No, you haven’t. You haven’t been here since a quarter past ten this
morning,” she assured him.
He hung his head a moment, then looked an ugly defiance. “Well, I’ve
been in to Verdun to spend the day with a friend. What are you going to
do about it?”
“I’m going to have you punished for disobeying an officer,” she said
promptly, though so little military had been her beneficent life, that
she had no more idea than you or I or any other woman would have of
what punishment could be given in such a case.
“Officer’s orders!” said the man. “_What_ officer?” All the men laughed.
“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the
military authority in charge of such cases.
“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she
said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”
The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks,
saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony,
carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin
laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the
nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about _discipline_,
after that,” she says. “Of course there were the utter incompetents
to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of
sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for
a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had
reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the
time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and
tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always
write me once in a while, wherever they are.”
As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances
to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the
_abris_, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before
dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid
cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin,
working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers,
needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her
men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and
admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful things; then,
best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the
matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it
was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison,
who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no
further difficulty with discipline.
The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man
going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down
with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his
squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s
back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or
five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine
the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench
in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but
an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink
of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not
imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men
were brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy
beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with
weakness and fever and horror.
And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little
upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we
are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being
who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made
her fit to cope with the crisis of that night--and of the more than
four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did,
competently, resolutely, _successfully_. “Oh yes, we gave them cold
baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow.
They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections,
the right food--everything very primitive at first, of course, but
everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses
was very low always.”
“But how? _How?_ How did you manage?” you ask.
“Oh, at the beginning everything was very rough. We had only one
portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly
infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub
than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I
could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they
were sent.”
“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s
a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”
“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”
“‘_Nurses_,’ you say! Farm-laborers, accountants, barbers, drunken
druggists!”
“But I got rid of that good-for-nothing pharmacist at once! And the
others--the twelve good ones--they learned what to do. They learned how
to give the simple remedies. They learned how to do the other things
enough to give me a report--how to take temperatures, how to give the
baths at the right degree for the right time, how to take the pulse.”
“How could they learn all that?” you ask, amazed.
“I taught them,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, slightly surprised, in the
simplest, most matter-of-fact tone.
You look past her, out there to that hand-to-hand struggle with
death which was carried on by the one indomitable will and the one
well-trained mind, strong enough not only to animate this woman’s body
before you, but those other bodies and ignorant, indocile minds.
“They did it very well, too,” she assures you, and you do not doubt her.
That woman could teach anybody to do anything.
You come back to details. “But how could you get enough water and heat
it for so many baths, on just those rough, small, heating-stoves?”
“Well, we were at it all the time, practically, day and night. We cut
the tops off those big gasoline-cans the automobilists use, and stood
one on every stove up and down the barracks. There wasn’t a moment when
water wasn’t being heated, or used, or carried away.”
“What could you do about intestinal hemorrhages?” you ask. “You
must have had many, with such advanced cases. Your farm-hand nurses
couldn’t----”
“I never tried to teach them how to handle any real crisis, only to
recognize it when it came, and go quickly to fetch me. I taught them
to watch carefully and at the first sign of blood on their patients’
clothing or on the mattress, to take the knapsack out from under the
sick man’s head--they had no other pillow, of course--to lay him down
flat, and then to run and call me, from wherever I was.”
“You must have had almost no sleep at all.”
“That was the greatest help I had, being able to get along on little
sleep. And I got more work out of my helpers than any man could, for
they were ashamed to ask to sleep or rest, seeing that a woman, half
their size, could still keep going.”
“But how about your famous hygienic regularity, the morning exercises
and cold baths and----”
“Oh, as soon as I saw I was in for a long period of regular service, I
took the greatest care to go on with all the things which keep one fit
for regular service.”
“Morning tubs?”
“Yes, morning tubs! I slept--what time I had to sleep--in an abandoned
peasant’s house in an evacuated village near the hospital. I didn’t
take any of the downstairs rooms because people are likely to walk
right into an abandoned house, and part of the time there were soldiers
quartered in the village. Then there was usually somebody in the house
with me. The other times I had it all to myself. I took a room on the
second floor. It happened to have a flight of steps leading up to it,
and another one going out of it into the attic. Of course, I never had
any heat, and the drafts from those two open stairways--well, it was
like sleeping in the middle of a city square. Sometimes I used to take
down a bottle filled with hot water, but the bed was so cold that it
was almost instantly chilled. Many a time I have gone to sleep, all
curled up in a ball, holding my feet in my hands, because they were
so cold, and wakened to find them still as icy. Oh, the cold! That
is the worst enemy of all at the front, the most wearing, the most
demoralizing, the most dehumanizing, because it _lasts_ so. With other
things--hunger, wounds, danger--either it kills you, or it passes. But
the cold is always there.”
She loses herself for a moment in brooding recollection and you wonder
if Jeanne d’Arc ever did anything braver for her country than did this
delicate, stout-hearted modern woman, sleeping alone for months and
months in bitter cold in a deserted house in a deserted village.
She comes back to the present. “And it was there that I took my morning
tubs!” she says with an amused smile. “Of course the water froze hard
into a solid lump. So I put _carbonate de potasse_ into it. This not
only kept it from freezing, but made it alkaline, so that it was an
excellent detergent and stimulant to the skin. I assure you, after a
night in which I had been incessantly called from one bed to another,
when I felt very much done-up, my cold sponge-bath in that water was
like a resurrection. I was made over. Then, of course, no matter how
busy I was, I took care of my feet--changed my stockings and shoes
every day. Feet are one’s weakest point in a long pull like that.”
You venture to remark about a slight limp noticeable when she walks.
“Yes, it comes from a frozen foot--I have to admit it. But it’s really
not my fault. That was later, at the time of the battle at Verdun.
There are always brief crises, when you have to give your all and not
stop to think. I went nine days then without once taking off my shoes.
I hadn’t my other pair by that time. The _Boches_ had them, probably.”
But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second
tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor,
there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of
continuous service--for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt
in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and
more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven
days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax.
Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on duty,
active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.
She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups,
and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the
proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the
necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the
contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun,
she was also a figure of international importance, the _Présidente_ of
the Hygiene Department of the _Conseil International des Femmes_--her
predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the
big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable
world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed
so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The
little _aide major_ sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in
everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of
experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the
midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by
item, a little corner of order and competent activity. In November,
1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and
tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if
you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front
line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital,
where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort--except a certainty
that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by
the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive
against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good
care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing
facilities--everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be
had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she
had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.
All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front.
The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month
of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive
suspense being torturing for human nerves, especially tired human
nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.
Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck
faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes
and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her
colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her
setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on
everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape,
and did not succumb to the temptation, which is too much for so many
doctors under strain, of hypodermics of strychnin, and other stimulants.
February 1st came. The great storm, looming murkily, had not burst.
February inched itself along, and finally, because human nature can
only stand about so much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter
fatigue.
On February 21st, which was a Monday, it was fairly clear, cold, with
what passes for sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin stepped out
in front of her shed-hospital ward, after lunch, and made this remark
to herself: “I don’t believe the _Boches_ are going to pull off that
offensive at all. And to-day is almost sunny. I have a good notion to
go over to the 165th and get my hair washed.” There was an ex-coiffeur
in that regiment who kept on with his trade in his leisure moments.
As this singularly peace-time thought passed through her mind, an
_obus_ screamed its way loudly over her head. “That’s near,” she
thought, “nearer than they generally are.”
Before she could get back into the hospital, the battle of Verdun had
begun.
The blow was delivered with astounding rapidity, and with stunning
force. Up to that time, nothing had ever been conceived like the
violence of the artillery fire. There in the hospital, only two
kilometers back of the front, the noise was so great they could
scarcely hear each other’s voices. Upon those men, and that woman,
unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking suspense, the great crisis
leaped with murderous fury. It was as though the world were being
battered to pieces about their heads. Each one called up in himself all
the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as
best he could to self-control.
The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly
burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp
cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away,
anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this
beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the
tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen
if every one ran away!”
One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility the outstretched
restraining arms, called out heartily, with a strong Southern accent,
“Right you are, doctor, perfectly right!” and continued to run faster
than ever. Which typically _Midi_ phrase and action was seized upon by
those gallant French hearts for the laugh which is the Gallic coquetry
in the face of danger.
But even they could not smile at what they next saw. At four o’clock
that afternoon began the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments
of _chasseurs_ fleeing toward the rear.
“So inconceivable was this to me, that I repeated, ‘_Chasseurs!_
Retreating!’”
Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment as if she saw them again.
“Oh, yes, retreating--and no wonder! All their equipment gone, no guns,
no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets--their bare fists, and those
bleeding, for weapons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally naked,
except for their leather cartridge belts. Everything made of cloth had
been blown from their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding shells.
Many of them were horribly wounded, although they were staggering
along. I remember one man, whose wounds we dressed, who came reeling
up to the hospital, holding his hand to his face, and when he took his
hand down most of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were retreating,
those who had enough life left to walk. And they told us that Verdun
was lost, that no human power could resist that thrust.”
All that night, and all the next day and all the next night, such men
poured through and past the hospital and during all that time there was
no cessation in the intolerable, maddening din of the artillery. When
you ask Dr. Girard-Mangin how she lived through those days and nights,
she tells you steadily, “Oh, that was not the worst. We could still
work. And we did. More than eighteen thousand wounded passed through
the hospital that week. We had too much to do to think of anything
else. It seemed as though all the men in the world were wounded and
pouring in on us.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men changed in character somewhat,
and this meant that the end was near. In place of _chasseurs_ and the
ordinary _poilus_, quantities of brown Moroccans, those who fight at
the very front, came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of them,
yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at themselves like children
and howling like wild beasts--impossible to understand or to make
understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital staff, staggering with
fatigue themselves, ministered to them, too, until--this was where
they all touched bottom--until, on Wednesday night, the electricity
suddenly gave out and, in the twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on
the great wards, shaken by the incessant infernal screaming rush of
the shells overhead, by the thunder of the cannon, and filled with the
shrieks of the agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness like the end
of the world.
Messengers were sent hastily to grope their way down to the nearest
village for candles. But they returned empty-handed. Long before that
the soldiers had carried off all the supply of candles.
“What did you do, all that night?”
Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of belittling the experience.
“It was awful beyond anything imaginable,” she tells you gravely. “The
worst thing that can happen to a doctor had come--to be in the midst
of suffering and not to be able to lift a finger to help. All that we
could do was to give them water to drink. We could feel our way to
the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we could only sit, helpless,
listen to the shells and to the wounded men groaning, and wait for
dawn.”
Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, like you, like me,
who lived through those days and those nights, and came through them
morally and physically intact, into an even greater usefulness. It will
not be a bad thing to remember her the next time we feel “tired” in our
ordinary round of small efforts.
On the next day came the order to evacuate the hospital, bitter proof
of the German success. Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick
men in relays of four in the only ambulance at her disposal. They were
taken down to the nearest little branch railroad, there put on the
train, and sent--nobody knew where, anywhere out of the range of German
guns.
All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By Thursday evening there
were left only nine men in her ward, men practically dying, far gone
with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. Dr. Girard-Mangin spent
another black night beside her dying men, moving from one to another
in the intense obscurity, raising her voice above the thunder of
the artillery to comfort them, to give them what small help she
could without a light. On Friday all the hospital staff, with a few
exceptions, was to leave. The hospital buildings and equipment were to
be left in the charge of a non-com and two privates; and the men too
ill to transport were to be left with one doctor and two aides. The
rule in the French Sanitary Service for that case is that the youngest
doctor stays with the sick. Dr. Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor.
But at this, the good head-doctor, who had daughters of his own in
Paris, cried out that there was a limit, that he would never forgive
any man who left a daughter of his alone in such a position, alone
with dying men, alone under fire, alone to face the _Boches_. No, no
Frenchman could be expected to do that.
Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to the military authority in
command, for permission to do her duty as it fell to her. “I have not
failed in my services so far. It is not just to force me to fail now.”
The military ruling was that the usual rule would hold. The little
woman doctor stayed in danger, and the men went back to the rear. The
parting was a moving one; those comrades of hers who had seen her
working by their sides for so many months took her in their arms and
wept openly as they bade her good-by.
If you venture to ask her what were her own emotions at this moment,
she tells you with a shudder, “Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for
France. We all thought, you know, that Verdun had fallen, that the
Germans had pierced the line. No one knew how far they had gone. It was
an awful moment.” Apparently she did not think of herself at all.
All day Friday, she was there with her stricken men and with two
aides. Friday night she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday the
man left in charge of the hospital buildings went mad from the nervous
tension--they expected almost from hour to hour to see the Germans
appear--and from the hellish noise of the artillery.
I find myself cold as I try to think what another black night meant in
those conditions. Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into another
dawn.