that any one was still there, sent peremptory orders that the premises
must be evacuated entirely, dying men and all. They would certainly
be killed if they were kept there. And more, there was no longer
anything to give them to eat. This was a military order and so overrode
the rulings of the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin prepared to
evacuate. She had at her disposition a small _camion_ in which she put
the four men best able to be carried, and her own ambulance in which
she packed the five worst cases, crosswise of the vehicle. To try to
give them some security against the inevitable jolting, she bound
them tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, with her little
medicine-kit, she got in beside them and told her chauffeur to take
them to Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route taken by the
_ravitaillement_ convoys, because her sick men could never live through
the length of that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along
directly back of the front.
“I wonder that he was willing to take that dangerous route,” you say.
“I didn’t ask his opinion about it,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin with a ring
of iron in her voice.
So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, constantly under fire,
with five men at the point of death. The chauffeur dodged between the
bursting shells, the woman in the car watched her sick men closely and
kept them up with hypodermics of stimulants--which are not administered
by a shaking hand!
You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar on her cheek, “It was
then, during that ride, that you were wounded, wasn’t it?”
She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, “And when we finally
reached Clermont-en-Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I
found the hospital absolutely swamped with wounded. I said I was there
with five mortally sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ‘If they
were all Generals we could not take them in. You are mad, Madame, to
bring _sick_ men here.’ So we went on ten kilometers further to a
little village called Froidos, where my face-wound was dressed and
where finally I was able to leave my men, all alive still, in good
hands.”
“They didn’t live to get well, did they?” you ask.
At this question, she has a moment of stupefaction before the picture
of your total incomprehension of what she has been talking about; she
has a moment’s retrospective stare back into that seething caldron
which was the battle of Verdun; she opens her mouth to cry out on your
lack of imagination; and she ends by saying quietly, almost with pity
for your ignorance, “Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. There
was a great deal too much else to be done at that time.”
Have you lost track of time and place in that adventure of hers? It
is not surprising. She was then in the little village of Froidos, on
the afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost exactly a week after
the battle began--and after almost exactly a week of unbelievable
horror--after four nights spent without a light in a great hospital
full of wounded men--after a ride of nearly fifty kilometers constantly
under fire, with mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a
good soldier who has accomplished the task set him, to report at
headquarters for another.
Her headquarters, the _Direction du Service Sanitaire_ was at
Bar-le-Duc. Without a moment’s rest or delay, she set out for
Bar-le-Duc, she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of sleep. They
arrived there at midnight. She reported herself at the hospital, so
large that in normal times it holds three thousand wounded. “I have
just brought in the last of the sick from the military hospital at
Verdun,” she said, to explain her presence. They were astounded to
hear that any one had been there so lately. Every one had thought that
certainly the Germans were there by that time.
“Please, is there a place where I may sleep a few hours?” she said.
But there was no place, not one. The great hospital was crowded to the
last inch of its space with wounded--halls, passageways, aisles, even
the stairs had wounded on them. Finally some one gave her a blanket
and she lay down on the floor in the little office of the head-doctor
and slept till morning--five or six hours. Then she went out into the
town to try to find a lodging. Not one to be had, the town being as
full as the hospital. She had not taken her clothes off, naturally, nor
her shoes.
“Oh, then I did feel tired,” she says. “That morning, for the first
time, I knew how tired I was, as I went dragging myself from door to
door, begging for a room and a bed. It was because I was no longer
working, you see. As long as you have work to do, you can go on.”
At last a poor woman took pity on her, said that she and her daughter
would sleep together on one narrow bed, and let her have the other one.
“I was so glad, so glad,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin, “to know I was to
have a real bed! I was like a child. When you are as tired as that, you
don’t think of anything but the simple elementals--lying down, being
warm, having something to eat--all your fine, civilized ideas are swept
away.”
She went back toward the hospital to get what few things she had been
able to bring with her, and there she saw her chauffeur waving a paper
toward her. “We are to be off at once,” he said, and showed her an
order to leave Bar-le-Duc without delay, taking two nurses with them,
and to go with all speed to the hospital at Vadelaincourt. They were
crowded with wounded there.
“Then, at once, my tiredness went away,” she says. “It only lasted
while I thought of getting a bed. When I knew we were going into action
once more, I was myself again.”
By two o’clock that afternoon--this was Monday--they were _en route_
for the hospital, the doctor on the seat by the chauffeur, the two
nurses, hysterical with fear over the shells, weeping inside.
“What a terrible, tragic, inspiring trip that was!” she exclaims, and
almost for the only time during her quietly told narration her voice
quivers, her eyes suffuse. “We were going against the tide of fresh
reserves, rushing out to the front--mile after mile, facing those
strongly marching ranks of splendid young Frenchmen, all going out to
suffer the unimaginable horrors from which I had just come. I could not
bear to look into those eager, ardent faces. I was so proud of them, so
yearning over them! And they were so full of spirit, hurrying forward
to the supreme sacrifice. They shouted out to us again and again, ‘The
battle isn’t over yet, is it? Will we get there in time?’ They laughed
light-heartedly, the younger ones, when they saw me and called out,
‘Oh, the women are fighting out there, too, are they?’ Wave after wave
of them, rank on rank, the best of my country, marching out to death.”
They were delayed by an accident to a tire, being instantly--as is the
rule on military roads, always crammed to the last inch--lifted bodily
into a neighboring field for repairs. No stationing for repairs is
allowed on a road where every one is incessantly in movement. While
the repairs were being made, the car sank deeper and deeper into the
mud, and it was a Herculean undertaking to get it back in the main
thoroughfare. As usual, a crowd of good-natured _poilus_ managed this,
heaving together with the hearty good-will to which all drivers of
American ambulances can testify.
Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when they drew near their
destination. The chauffeur turned off the main road into a smaller
one, a short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in mud up to his
hubs. From twelve o’clock that night till half-past five in the
morning, they labored to make the few kilometers which separated them
from Vadelaincourt. Once the chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush
of water against the car, announced that he was sure that the river
had burst its banks, that they had missed the bridge and were now in
the main current. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investigate and found
herself knee-deep in mud so liquid that its sound had deceived the
chauffeur. They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wringing their
hands.
By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived at the hospital, where the
hard-worked head-doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, cried
out upon her for being a woman, but told her for Heaven’s sake to stay
and help. The nurses were taken in and set to work, where at once
they forgot themselves and their fears. But again there was no place
for the new doctor to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with human
wreckage. She did what all ambulance people hate to do, she went back
to the reeking ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots and
all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked blankets of her ex-patients,
and instantly fell asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place of
sleeping under the car, on another stretcher.
She had no more than closed her eyes, when came a loud, imperious
pounding on the car, “Get up quickly. The _médecin-en-chef_ sends
for you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought in; every hand
needed.”
She went back through the mud to the hospital, had a cup of hot coffee
and--detail eloquent of the confusion and disorganization of that
feverish week--some plum-cake! By what freak of _ravitaillement_ there
was only plum-cake, she never knew.
Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. She went into the
operating-room at half-past seven in the morning. She operated
steadily, without stopping, for more than five hours. At one o’clock
she felt giddy and her legs failed her. She sat down flat on the floor,
leaning back against the wall. “Here it comes!” she said to herself,
fighting the faintness which dissolved all her members, “Here comes
womanishness!”
But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her teeth and tightening
her will until she conquered it. A new relay of doctors came in. She
staggered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate and another piece
of plum-cake! And was told that she would be “off duty” till eight that
evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. Snow lay on the fields,
mud was deep in the roads. There was not a bed empty.
“I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a comfortable chair,” she
tells you, “and took down my hair and brushed and braided it. You know
how much that rests you!”
Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in the world over whom to
sentimentalize, and I swore before beginning to write about her that I
would try not to do it. But I can not restrain myself from asking you
here if you do not feel with me like both laughing and crying at the
inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar gesture, at the picture
of that shining little warrior-figure, returning in that abomination of
desolation to the simple action of a sheltered woman’s everyday home
life?
Then she went to sleep, there in the “quite comfortable” chair, with
her shoes unlaced but still on her feet. “I had lost my other pair
somewhere along the route,” she explains, “and I didn’t dare to take
those off because I knew I could never get them on again if I did.”
There followed twenty days of this terrific routine, steady work in
the operating-room with intervals of seven hours’ “rest,” with nowhere
to go to rest. “But the food got better almost at once,” she says, in
explanation of her having lived through it. “We couldn’t have gotten
along on plum-cake, of course!”
For nine of those twenty days, she never took off her shoes at all, and
the foot was frozen there which now she drags a little in walking.
On March 23rd, a month after the battle of Verdun had begun, the
_médecin-chef-inspecteur_ came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual
motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor there, decided--rather
late--that it was no place for a woman, and sent her to Châlons. For
six months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near Ypres, working
specially among the tubercular soldiers, but also taking her full share
of military surgery. “Just the usual service at the front, nothing
of special interest,” she says with military brevity, baffling your
interest, and leaving you to find out from other sources that she was
wounded again in June of that year.
On the 11th of October, 1916, a remarkable and noteworthy event took
place. For once a Governmental action was taken with intelligence.
The Government, wishing to institute a special course of training for
military nurses at the front, called to its organization and direction,
not somebody’s relation-in-law, not a politician’s protégée, but the
woman in France best fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on
the part of any Government is worthy of note!
The hospital which had been built for charitable purposes on the Rue
Desnouettes was loaned to the Government. What was needed for its head
was some one who knew all about what training was essential for nursing
service at the front. Any good military doctor could have done this
part. Also some one was needed who knew all about what is the life
of a woman at the front. Any good nurse of military experience could
have seen to this. Also there was needed a person with experience in
organization, with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in smooth
and regular running. Any good business man could have managed this.
Furthermore there was needed a person with magnetism who could inspire
the women passing through the school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with
devotion-- I needn’t go on, I think. You must have seen that only one
person combined all these qualifications, and she is the one now at the
head of the hospital-school.
Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summoning her back to that “work at
the rear” which is such a trial for those who have known the glory of
direct service at the front.
This meant drudgery for her, long hours of attention to
uninteresting but important details, work with a very mixed class of
intelligences--the women in her courses of study vary from peasant
girls to officers’ widows; bending her quick intelligence to cope with
sloth and dullness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, living
again in the midst of petty bickerings, little personal jealousies,
mean ambitions. Nothing is more startling for those who “come back
from the front” than to find the world at the rear still going on with
its tiny quarrels and disputes, still industriously raking in its
muck-heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our average, ordinary
life than the intense moral depression which attends the return to
it of those who have for a time escaped from it to a rougher, more
dangerous, and more self-forgetful atmosphere.
For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin’s usefulness is more dramatic
than the undramatic phase of it in which she is now faithfully
toiling. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness under overwhelming
responsibilities, her astonishing physical endurance do not thrill me
more than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up civilian life
again and quiet, civilian duties.
She has organized the hospital ingeniously along original lines, as a
perfect reproduction of what the nurses will encounter at the front:
a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with the nurse’s little
sleeping-cubicle at the end with its rough but sufficient sanitary
arrangements. Another unit is given over to the operating-room and
its appendages, the sterilizing-room, anesthetic-room, etc. Another
is the administrative building, and contains the offices of the
_médecin-en-chef_, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, the bacteriological
laboratory. At one side are very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters
and study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who pass through the
school every three months. For Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in
hand when they have already completed a course of training in ordinary
hospitals. Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the
short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the
necessary physical, mental, and moral qualities to fit them for the
grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from
this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely
to be nurses there.
The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less,
monotonous, like all teaching--an ever-reiterated repetition of the
same thing--no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. The clear
brown eyes face it as coolly, as undaunted, as they faced bursting
shells, or maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain sees its vital
importance to the country as well as it saw the more picturesque need
for staying with sick men under fire. The well-tempered will keeps
lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps the whole highly strung, highly
developed organism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work for France.
There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is a citizen to envy, to
imitate!
LOURDES
_From the Ends of the Earth they come--Old and Young, the Lame and the
Blind--to Ask for the Blessing._
Afternoon. There was not a vacant place left in the long line of
waiting sick, so that at the last, when a little, white-faced blind boy
with dreadful horny growths on his eyes, was handed over the heads of
the crowd, he seemed to have come too late.
His mother’s voice rose anxiously, in reiterated piteous demands to the
stretcher-carriers to make a place for him, any place, where he could
receive the blessing, for it was the day of the greatest pilgrimage of
the year, when twenty-five thousand people sang and prayed together for
the cure of the sick, when the Host was carried in solemn procession to
bless them, lying in long lines up and down the broad esplanade.
“Oh, for the love of God, find a place for him!” she implored, in so
strained a voice of entreaty that the crowd, dense as it was, gave way
a little and allowed her to press forward, back of the wheeled chairs
of the cripples. The stretcher-carrier who had taken the child in his
arms hesitated, looking about him for a vacant spot. He glanced at a
wounded soldier, rigid on his litter, his face as white as it would be
in his coffin; and then turned to a child stricken with a disease of
the bones which paralyzed his legs and made of his hands only twisted,
shapeless stumps, but which still permitted him to sit in one of the
wheeled chairs. His little withered body did not half fill it, and it
was there beside him that the attendant decided to put down the blind
boy.
His mother gave a long sigh of intense feeling and between the closely
packed bodies of the crowd strained forward to be near him.
“I’m here, darling, I’m here,” she said in a voice of concentrated
tenderness.
The blind boy turned his hanging head a little, toward the sound of her
voice and stretched back a thin, waxy-white hand. She managed to touch
it for an instant, but then said, “Not now, darling. You mustn’t turn
back toward Mother. You must join your hands and pray to be cured, pray
for the blessing. You must repeat whatever the priest says.”
For at that moment the powerfully built, bearded priest, with the eyes
of fire and the thrown-back head of born command, strode down the
center of the great open place and stood looking intently about him at
the lines of the white-faced sick, and the immense throngs of pilgrims
back of them. He raised his hands suddenly in a vivid gesture, and
cried in a trumpet-like voice, like a captain leading forward a charge,
“Brothers, pray! Pray for our sick. With all your soul, with all the
strength of your body and mind, pray God for our sick!”
He paused a moment. Every eye was on him.
The blind boy held his face lowered meekly as blind children often do,
as sensitive children who know themselves unsightly always do. His
thin, white neck was bent like that of a victim awaiting the blow,
but he put his little pale fingers together and, turning for a moment,
tried to show to his mother that they were in the attitude of prayer.
She whispered, “Yes, yes, darling, that is right. But not toward me.
Toward where the blessing is coming, so that you may be cured.”
“Lord save us! Lord God save us, for we perish!” prayed the priest in a
loud clear voice of exaltation; and after him all the multitude cried
it aloud, in a great murmur like the voice of a forest, or of the sea.
The blind boy’s lips moved with the rest, but his little face was
clouded and anxious. He whispered to the crippled child beside him:
“Are you blind, too, or can you see?”
“I can see,” said the other, “but I have never walked.”
“Then you must show me where I must put my hands so that they will be
toward the blessing,” begged the blind child.
The other took the thin, transparent fingers between his twisted
stumps, and directed them toward the priest, thrillingly upright,
aspiring visibly toward the sky. “There, you must keep them turned
toward the priest now,” he said with an accent of certainty. “Later on
it will be toward the procession as it moves along, and then at the
last toward the church.”
“You must tell me when to change them,” said the blind boy.
He stretched out his joined hands farther in the direction indicated
by his companion and repeated with the others, after the priest, his
little voice lost in the great upward rush of the supplications of the
thousands around him, “Lord! Lord! Our sole trust is in Thee!”
The priest’s voice soared into a glorious note of song, in which the
multitude joined, their eyes on him, their faces solemn in expectation.
The priest sang a line, the multitude chanted a response; the man’s
voice ran out again, yearning, beseeching, the voice of the multitude
rose thousand-fold in answer. The earth seemed to shake in unison, the
low-hanging, heavy gray clouds to send back the sound. The chanting,
imploring, impassioned voice of the throng seemed more alive than its
multitudinous bodies, rapt into utter stillness.
“Is it thus that I should hold my hands?” whispered the blind boy after
a time.
“No, now the procession has just come into the other end of the
square,” said the crippled child. With an effort he leaned, took the
little white fingers again, and pointed them another way.
“So?” asked the blind child humbly.
“Yes, so,” answered the other. He tried to put his own shapeless stumps
together in the attitude of prayer and began to sing with the pilgrims
now defiling before them in endless lines, “Praise! All praise to Thee!
Praise, all praise to Thee, Lord God!” The pilgrims were passing by,
now, in single file, each with his long white taper, burning yellow in
the gray light of the gray day. Their voices were loud and personal,
each one as he passed being heard for an instant alone. “Glory! Glory
to Thee!” they all sang the propitiatory words together, over and
over, a hundred times repeated--the old wrinkled peasants in their
blouses; the elegant officers in their well-cut uniforms; the stout
elderly merchants; the thin, weedy boys; the white-faced, shaven
priests; the black men from Senegal with bushy, woolly hair; the tall,
fair-haired man from England; the occasional soldier on leave in his
shapeless, faded, blue-gray uniform. Above all their voices rose the
silver bugle-like call of the priest, burning, devouring in its ardor,
“Brothers! Brothers! with all your souls, now. GLORY BE TO THEE! Oh,
Lord, save us, for we perish! Lord, our trust is in Thee. Praised be
Thy name!”
With each clamorous exhortation, repeated clamorously by all those
imploring voices, he lifted the multitude up another step toward the
great moment of awe and faith. The tears were streaming down the faces
of many of the women in the crowd. The little boy’s mother sobbed
loudly, and prayed with all her might.
The march past of the innumerable men, the incessant flickering passage
of their pale-yellow lights, the never-ending procession of their
pale, anxious faces, became an obsession. It seemed that every one,
everywhere in the world, was marching together, singing and praying,
hoping against hope for a miracle.
“Isn’t it time to change my hands?” asked the little blind boy
desperately. “I have heard so _many_ people pass. I am very, very
tired.”
“No, it is not yet time to change,” said the other, leaning forward to
look down the esplanade. “The procession with the Host goes very slowly
because it stops before each sick person. They are not near yet.”