The life of a hospital at the front is a curious mixture of excitement
and dullness. One week cases will be pouring in, the operating theatre
will be working day and night, and everyone will have to do their
utmost to keep abreast of the rush; next week there will be nothing to
do, and everyone will mope about the building, and wonder why they
were ever so foolish as to embark on such a futile undertaking. For it
is all emergency work, and there is none of the dull routine of the
ordinary hospital waiting list, which we are always trying to clear off,
but which is in reality the backbone of the hospital's work.
When we first started in Antwerp, the rush of cases was so great as to
be positively overwhelming. For more than twenty-four hours the
surgeons in the theatre were doing double work, two tables being
kept going at the same time. During that time a hundred and fifty
wounded were admitted, all of them serious cases, and the hospital
was full to overflowing. For the next ten days we were kept busy, but
then our patients began to recover, and many of them had to go away
to military convalescent hospitals. The wards began to look deserted,
and yet no more patients arrived. We began to think that it was all a
mistake that we had come, that there would be no more fighting round
Antwerp, and that we were not wanted. Indeed, we canvassed the
possibilities of work in other directions, and in the meantime we drew
up elaborate arrangements to occupy our time. There were to be
courses of lectures and demonstrations in the wards, and supplies of
books and papers were to be obtained. Alas for the vanity of human
schemes, the wounded began to pour in again, and not a lecture was
given.
During that slack week we took the opportunity to see a certain
amount of Antwerp, and to call on many officials and the many friends
who did so much to make our work there a success and our stay a
pleasure. To one lady we can never be sufficiently grateful. She
placed at our disposal her magnificent house, a perfect palace in the
finest quarter of the city. Several of our nurses lived there, we had a
standing invitation to dinner, and, what we valued still more, there
were five bathrooms ready for our use at any hour of the day. Their
drawing-room had been converted into a ward for wounded officers,
and held about twenty beds. One of the daughters had trained as a
nurse, and under her charge it was being run in thoroughly up-to-date
style. The superb tapestries with which the walls were decorated had
been covered with linen, and but for the gilded panelling it might have
been a ward in a particularly finished hospital. I often wonder what
has happened to that house. The family had to fly to England, and
unless it was destroyed by the shells, it is occupied by the Germans.
Calling in Antwerp on our professional brethren was very delightful for
one's mind, but not a little trying for one's body. Their ideas of
entertainment were so lavish, and it was so difficult to refuse their
generosity, that it was a decided mistake to attempt two calls in the
same afternoon. To be greeted at one house with claret of a rare
vintage, and at the next with sweet champagne, especially when it is
plain that your host will be deeply pained if a drop is left, is rather
trying to a tea-drinking Briton. They were very good to us, and we
owed a great deal to their help. Most of all we owed to Dr. Morlet, for
he had taken radiographs of all our fractures, and of many others of
our cases. We went to see him one Sunday afternoon at his beautiful
house in the Avenue Plantin. He also had partly converted his house
into a hospital for the wounded, and we saw twenty or thirty of them in
a large drawing-room. The rest of the house was given up to the most
magnificent electro-therapeutical equipment I have ever seen or
heard of. We wandered through room after room filled with superb
apparatus for X-ray examinations, X-ray treatment, diathermy, and
electrical treatment of every known kind. It was not merely that
apparatus for all these methods was there. Whole rooms full of
apparatus were given up to each subject. It was the home of a genius
and an enthusiast, who thought no sum too great if it were to advance
his science. Little did we think that ten days later we should pick its
owner up upon the road from Antwerp, a homeless wanderer,
struggling along with his wife and his family, leaving behind
everything he possessed in the world, in the hope that he might save
them from the Germans. We heard from him not long ago that they
had carried off to Germany all the wonderful machinery on which he
had spent his life.
The very next morning, while we were still at breakfast, the wounded
began to arrive, and we never had another day in Antwerp that was
not crowded with incident. The wounded almost always came in large
batches, and the reason of this was the method of distribution
adopted by the authorities. All the injured out at the front were
collected as far as possible to one centre, where a train was waiting
to receive them. There they remained until the train was sufficiently
filled, when it brought them into the Central Station of Antwerp. At this
point was established the distributing station, with a staff of medical
officers, who arranged the destination of each man. Antwerp has a
very complete system of electric trams, scarcely a street being without
one, and of these full use was made for the transport of the wounded.
Those who could sit went in ordinary cars, but for the stretcher cases
there were cars specially fitted to take ordinary stretchers. A car was
filled up with cases for one hospital, and in most cases it could
deposit them at the door. It was an admirable method of dealing with
them, simple and expeditious, and it involved far less pain and injury
to the men than a long journey on an ambulance. In fact, we were
only allowed in exceptional circumstances to bring in wounded on our
cars, and it is obvious that it was a wise plan, for endless confusion
would have been the result if anyone could have picked up the
wounded and carried them off where they liked. Our cars were limited
for the most part to carrying the injured to the various dressing-
stations and to the train, and for these purposes they were always
welcomed. They were soon well known at the trenches, and wherever
the fighting was heaviest you might be sure to find one of them. Many
were the hairbreadth escapes of which they had to tell, for if there
were wounded they brought them out of danger, shells or no shells.
And it says as much for the coolness of the drivers as for their good
luck that no one was ever injured; for danger is halved by cool
judgment, and a bold driver will come safely through where timidity
would fail.