Our work at Furnes differed in many ways from that at Antwerp.
All its conditions were rougher, and, as we had to deal with a
number of patients out of all proportion to our size, it was
impossible to keep any but a few special cases for any length of
time. We admitted none but the most serious cases, such as
would be instantly admitted to any London hospital, and when I
mention that in five weeks we had just a thousand cases in our
hundred beds, the pressure at which the work was carried on
will be realized. There is no hospital in England, with ten times
the number of beds, that has ever admitted to its wards
anything like this number of serious surgical cases. We were
essentially a clearing hospital, with this important proviso, that
we could, when it was required, carry out at once the heaviest
operative work, and retain special cases as long as we thought
fit. Our object was always to get each patient into such a
condition that he could be transferred back to the base without
injury to his chances of recovery, and without undue pain, and I
believe we saved the life of many a patient by giving him a
night's rest in the Straw Ward, and sending him on next day
with his wound properly dressed and supported. The cases
themselves were of a far more severe type than those we had
at Antwerp. There, indeed, I was astonished at the small
amount of injury that had in many cases resulted from both
shrapnel and bullet wounds, and it was certainly worthy of note
that we had never once in our work there had to perform an
amputation. At Furnes, we drew our patients from the line
between Nieuport and Dixmude, where the fighting was for the
most part at close range and of a most murderous nature.
There were no forts, and the soldiers had little or no protection
from the hail of high-explosive shells which the enemy poured
upon them. In Nieuport and Dixmude themselves the fighting
was frequently from house to house, the most deadly form of
fighting known. The wounds we had to treat were correspondingly
severe--limbs sometimes almost completely torn off, terrible
wounds of the skull, and bullet wounds where large masses of
the tissues had been completely torn away. It was difficult to
see how human beings could survive such awful injuries, and,
indeed, our death-roll was a long one. Added to this, the men
had been working in the wet and the mud for weeks past. Their
clothes were stiff with it, and such a thing as a clean wound was
not to be thought of. Simple cases at Antwerp were here tedious
and dangerous, and they required all the resources of nursing
and of surgery that we could bring to bear upon them. Still,
it was extraordinary what good results followed on common-sense
lines of treatment, and we soon learnt to give up no case as
hopeless. But each involved a great amount of work, first in
operating and trying to reduce chaos to reason, and then in
dressing and nursing. For everyone all round--surgeons,
dressers, and nurses--it was real hard physical labour.
Our rapid turnover of patients involved a large amount of
manual labour in stretcher work, clearing up wards, and so on,
but all this was done for us by our brancardiers, or stretcher-bearers.
These were Belgians who for one reason or another could not
serve with the army, and who were therefore utilized by the
Government for purposes such as these. We had some eight
of them attached to our hospital, and they were of the greatest
use to us, acting as hospital orderlies. They were mostly
educated men--schoolmasters and University teachers--but
they were quite ready to do any work we might require at
any hour of the day or night. They carried the patients to the
theatre and to the wards, they cleaned the stretchers--a very
difficult and unpleasant job--they tidied up the wards and scrubbed
the floors, and they carried away all the soiled dressings and
burned them. They were a fine set of men, and I do not know
what we should have done without them.
Work began at an early hour, for every case in the hospital
required dressing, and, as we never knew what we should have
to deal with at night, we always tried to get through the routine
before lunch. At ten o'clock Colonel Maestrio arrived, with two of
his medical officers, and made a complete round of the hospital
with the surgeons in charge of the various cases. They took the
greatest interest in the patients, and in our attempts to cure
them. They would constantly spend an hour with me in the
operating theatre, and after any exceptional operation they
would follow the progress of the patient with the keenest
interest. Many of the cases with which we had to deal required
a certain amount of ingenuity in the reconstruction of what had
been destroyed, so that surgery had often to be on rather
original lines. What interested them most was the fixation of
fractures by means of steel plates, which we adopted in all our
serious cases. Apparently the method is very little used abroad,
and as an operation it is distinctly spectacular, for in a few
minutes a shapeless mass which the patient cannot bear to be
touched is transformed into a limb almost as strong as the
other, which can be moved about in any direction without fear of
breaking, and, when the patient recovers consciousness,
almost without discomfort. We almost always had an interested
audience, professional, clerical, or lay, for the chauffeurs found
much amusement in these feats of engineering.
In the afternoon we almost always had some distinguished
visitor to entertain, and it is one of my chief regrets that we
never kept a visitors' book. Its pages would one day have been
of the greatest interest. Twice every week the Queen of the
Belgians came round our wards. She came quite simply, with
one of her ladies and one of the Belgian medical officers, and
no one could possibly have taken a deeper interest in the
patients. Her father studied medicine as a hobby, and had,
indeed, become a very distinguished physician, and she herself
has had considerable training in medicine, so that her interest
was a great deal more than that of an ordinary lay visitor. She
was quite able to criticize and to appreciate details of nursing
and of treatment. She always spoke to every patient, and she
had a kind word for every one of them, Belgian, French, or even
German, for we had a few Germans. There was something deeply
touching in the scene. The dimly lit ward, with its crude furniture,
the slim figure in black, bending in compassion over the rough
fellows who would gladly have given their lives for her, and
who now lay wounded in the cause in which she herself had
suffered. The Germans may destroy Belgium, but they will never
destroy the kingdom of its Queen. Sometimes the King came
to see his soldiers--a tall, silent man, with the face of one who
has suffered much, and as simple, as gentle, and as kindly as
his Queen. It was good to see the faces light up as he entered
a ward, to see heads painfully raised to gaze after no splendid
uniform, but a man.
One of our most distinguished and most welcome visitors was
Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium. She brought her large
X-ray equipment to Furnes for work amongst the wounded, and
we persuaded her to stay with us for a week. One of our
storerooms was rapidly fitted up as an impromptu radiographic
department, the windows painted over and covered with thick
paper, a stove introduced, and a dark-room contrived with the
aid of a cupboard and two curtains. Electric current was
obtained from a dynamo bolted on to the step of a twenty-horse-power
car, and driven by a belt from the flywheel of the engine. The
car stood out in the courtyard and snorted away, whilst we
worked in the storeroom alongside. The coil and mercury
break were combined in one piece, and the whole apparatus
was skilfully contrived with a view to portability. Madame Curie
was an indefatigable worker, and in a very short time had taken
radiographs of all the cases which we could place at her
disposal, and, indeed, we ransacked all the hospitals in Furnes,
for when they heard of her arrival, they were only too glad to
make use of the opportunity. Mademoiselle Curie developed
the plates, and between them they produced photographs of
the greatest utility to us.
Considering its obvious utility, whether in war or in civil practice,
it has always been a source of wonder to me that there is no
such thing as a car designed and built with a view to radiography.
Perhaps it exists, but if so, I have never met It only means the
building into the frame of suitable dynamo, and the provision of
means for storing the rest of the equipment. It would place an
X-ray equipment at the disposal of ever cottage hospital, or
even of a country-house, and it would place the cottage hospital,
not to mention the country-house, at the disposal of the
enterprising radiographer.
As soon as our patients could be moved, we had to send them
on to their base hospitals--the Belgians to Calais and the
French to Dunkirk.
From Calais the Belgians were brought over the Channel, and
distributed all over England and Scotland. I had a postcard from
one of them from Perth. The French were taken on in hospital
ships to Cherbourg and other seaports along the coast. From
Furnes they were all carried in hospital trains, and the scene at
the station when a large batch of wounded was going off was
most interesting. Only the worst cases were ever brought to our
hospital; all the others were taken straight to the station, and
waited there until a train was ready to take them on. Often they
would be there for twelve hours, or even twenty-four, before
they could be got on, and the train itself would be constantly
shunted to let troops and ammunition go by, and might take
twelve hours to reach its destination. There were no proper
arrangements for the feeding of these men, all of whom were
more or less badly wounded; and at first, when we heard at the
hospital that a train was about to be made up, we took down all
the soup and coffee we could manage to spare in big pails and
jugs. But this was a mere makeshift, and was superseded very
soon by a more up-to-date arrangement. A proper soup-kitchen
was established at the station, with huge boilers full of soup and
coffee always ready, and after that it was never necessary for a
wounded soldier to leave Furnes hungry. All this was due to the
energy and resource of Miss Macnaughtan, the authoress, who
took it up as her special charge. She had a little passage
screened off, and in this were fitted up boilers for coffee and
soup, tables for cutting up meat and vegetables, and even a
machine for cutting up the bread. It was all most beautifully
arranged, and here she worked all day long, preparing for the
inevitable crowd of wounded which the night would bring. How it
was all managed was a mystery to me, for there was not enough
food in Furnes to feed a tame cat, let alone a trainload of famished
soldiers, and I am looking anxiously for her next book in the
hopes of finding the solution.
The trains themselves were well equipped, though nothing to
the hospital trains of England. The more severe cases were
carried in long cars on a double row of stretchers, and they
looked very comfortable on a cold night, with their oil-lamps and
a coke stove in the centre of each car. A stretcher is, perhaps,
not exactly a bed of roses for a wounded man, but when one
considers what pain is involved in moving a man who is badly
wounded, there is obviously a great advantage in placing him
on a stretcher once for all on the battle-field, and never moving
him again until he can be actually placed in bed in a hospital.
On the train the men were looked after by the priests, splendid
fellows who never seemed tired of doing all they could for the
soldiers. One found the Belgian priest everywhere--in the
trenches, in the hospitals, and in the trains--unobtrusive,
always cheerful, always ready to help. From the brave Archbishop
Mercier to the humblest village cure, regardless of their comfort
and careless of their lives, they have stood by their people in
the hour of their trial. May their honour be great in the hour of
Belgium's triumph!