"I did once, Rees."
He looked down at the almost unrecognizable twelve inches which we call
"Rees's wound," and considered how this red inch had paled and the lips
of that incision were drawing together. "'Tisn' no more me arm," he said
at length, "than...." he paused for a simile. "'Tisn' me arm, it's me
wound," he finally explained.
His arm is stretched out at right angles from his bed in an iron cradle,
and has been for six months.
"Last night," he said, "I felt me arm layin' down by me side, an' I felt
the fingers an' tried to scratch me knee. It's a feeling that's bin
comin' on for some time, but last night it seemed real."
The pain of the dressing forces Rees's reason to lay some claim to his
arm, but when it ceases to hurt him he detaches himself from it to such
a point that the ghost-arm familiar to all amputations has arrived, as
it were, by mistake.
The new V.A.D. doesn't talk much at present, being shy, but to-night I
can believe she will write in her diary as I wrote in mine: "My feet
ache, ache, ache...." Add to that that she is hungry because she hasn't
yet learnt how to break the long stretches with hurried gnawings behind
a door, that she is sick because the philosophy of Rees is not yet her
philosophy, that her hands and feet grow cold and her body turns to warm
milk, that she longs so to sit on a bed that she can almost visualize
the depression her body would make on its counterpane, and I get a
glimpse of the passage of time and of the effect of custom.
With me the sickness and the hunger and the ache are barely remembered.
It makes me wonder what else is left behind.... The old battle is again
in my mind--the struggle to feel pain, to repel the invading
familiarity.
Here they come!
One convoy last night and another this morning. There is one great burly
man, a sort of bear, whose dried blood has squeezed through bandages
applied in seven places, and who for all that mumbles "I'm well" if one
asks him how he feels.
Long before those wounds are healed he will diagnose himself better than
that!
"I'm well...." That's to say: "I'm alive, and I have reached this bed,
and this bit of meat, and this pudding in a tin!" He answers by his
standards.
But in a few days he will think, "I am alive, but I might be better...";
and in a few weeks, "Is this, after all, happiness?"
How they sleep, the convoy men! Watching their wounds as we dress them,
almost with a grave pleasure--the passports to this wonderful sleep.
Then when the last safety-pin is in they lie back without making
themselves in the least comfortable, without drawing up a sheet or
turning once upon the pillow, and sleep just as the head falls.
How little women can stand! Even the convoy cannot mend the pains of the
new V.A.D. I dare not speak to her: she seems, poor camel, to be
waiting for the last straw.
But when we wash the bowls together we must talk. She and I together
this morning washed and scrubbed, rinsed, dried, and piled basins into
little heaps, and while we washed we examined each other.
She is a born slave; in fact, I almost think she is born to be tortured.
Her manner with the Sisters invites and entices them to "put upon" her.
Her spiritual back is already covered with sores.
I suppose she is hungry for sympathy, but it isn't really a case in
which sympathy can do as much as custom. I showed her the white
butterflies, without supposing them to be very solid food.
She reminds me of the man of whom the Sister said, "He must stick it
out." I might have pointed to the convoy and suggested comparisons; but
one cannot rub a sore back.
Some one has applied the last straw in the night.
When I came on duty a brisk little war-hardened V.A.D. was brushing a
pile of dust along the long boards to the door. The poor camel whose
back is broken is as though she had never existed; either she is ill or
she is banished.
Such is the secret diplomacy of these establishments that nothing is
known of her except her disappearance--at least among those whom one can
ask. Matron knows, Sister knows.... But these are the inscrutable,
smiling gods.
There is only one man in the ward I don't much care for--a tall boy with
a lock of fair hair and broken teeth. He was a sullen boy whose bad
temper made his mouth repulsive. I say "was," for he is different now.
Now he is feeble, gentle, grateful, and he smiles as often as one looks
at him.
Yesterday he went for his operation in the morning, and in the afternoon
when I came on duty he was stirring and beginning to groan. Sister told
me to sit beside him.
I went up to the little room of screens in which he lay, and taking a
wooden chair, I slipped it in between the screen and the bed and sat
down.
Is it the ether which rushes up from between his broken teeth?--is it
the red glare of the turkey-twill screens?--but in ten minutes I am
altered, mesmerized. Even the size of my surroundings is changed. The
screens, high enough to blot out a man's head, are high enough to blot
out the world. The narrow bed becomes a field of whiteness. The naked
arm stretched towards me is more wonderful than any that could have
belonged to a boy with dirty fair hair and broken teeth; it has
sea-green veins rising along it, and the bright hairs are more silver
than golden.
The life of the ward goes on, the clatter of cups for supper, the
shuffling of feet clad in loose carpet-slippers, but here within he and
I are living together a concentrated life.
"Oh, me back!"
"I know, I know...."
Do I know? I am getting to know. For while the men are drinking their
cocoa I am drinking ether. I know how the waves of the pain come up and
recede; how a little sleep just brushes the spirit, but never absorbs
it; how the arms will struggle up to the air, only to be covered and
enmeshed again in heat and blankets.
"Was it in me lung?" (He pronounces the "g"--a Lancashire boy....)
"The shrapnel?"
He nods. I hold up the piece of metal which has lain buried in him these
past three weeks. It has the number 20 engraved on it. That satisfies
him. The blood which has come from between his lips is in a bowl placed
too high for him to see.
Through the crack in the screens the man in the bed opposite watches us
unwinkingly.
Eight o'clock.... Here is Sister with the syringe: he will sleep now and
I can go home.
If one did not forget the hospital when one leaves it, life wouldn't be
very nice.
From pillar to post....
The dairyman, who has been gone to another hospital these five weeks,
returned to-day, saying miserably as he walked into the ward, "Me 'ead's
queerer than ever." His eyes, I think, are larger too, and he has still
that manner of looking as though he thought some one could do something
for him.
I can't--beyond raising the smallest of tablets to him with the
inscription, "Another farthing spent...."
Waker had a birthday yesterday and got ten post cards and a telegram.
But that is as nothing to another anniversary.
"A year to-morrow I got my wound--two o'clock to-morrow morning."
"Shall you be awake, Waker?"
"Yes."
How will he celebrate it? I would give a lot to know what will pass in
his mind. For I don't yet understand this importance they attach to such
an anniversary. One and all, they know the exact hour and minute on
which their bit of metal turned them for home.
Sometimes a man will whisper, "Nurse...." as I go by the bed; and when I
stop I hear, "In ten minutes it will be a twelvemonth!" and he fixes his
eyes on me.
What does he want me to respond? I don't know whether I should be glad
or sorry that he got it. I can't imagine what he thinks of as the minute
ticks. For I can see by his words that the scene is blurred and no
longer brings back any picture. "Did you crawl back or walk?"
"I ... walked." He is hardly sure.
I know that for some of them, for Waker, that moment at two o'clock in
the morning changed his whole career. From that moment his arm was
paralysed, the nerves severed; from that moment football was off, and
with it his particular ambition. And football, governing a kingdom, or
painting a picture--a man's ambition is his ambition, and when it is
wiped out his life is changed.
But he knows all that, he has had time to think of all that. What,
then, does this particular minute bring him?
They think I know; for when they tell me in that earnest voice that the
minute is approaching they take for granted that I too will share some
sacrament with them.
Waker is not everything a man should be: he isn't clever. But he is so
very brave.
After his tenth operation two days ago there was a question as to
whether he should have his pluggings changed under gas or not. The
discussion went on between the doctors over his bed.
But the anæsthetist couldn't be found.
He didn't take any part in the discussion such as saying, "Yes, I will
stand it...." but waited with interest showing on his bony face, and
when they glanced down at him and said, "Let's get it through now!" he
rolled over to undo his safety-pin that I might take off his sling.
It was all very fine for the theatre people to fill his shoulder
chockful of pluggings while he lay unconscious on the table; they had
packed it as you might stuff linen into a bag: it was another matter to
get it out.
I did not dare touch his hand with that too-easy compassion which I
have noticed here, or whisper to him "It's nearly over...." as the
forceps pulled at the stiffened gauze. It wasn't nearly over.
Six inches deep the gauze stuck, crackling under the pull of the
forceps, blood and puss leaping forward from the cavities as the steady
hand of the doctor pulled inch after inch of the gauze to the light. And
when one hole was emptied there was another, five in all.
Sometimes, when your mind has a grip like iron, your stomach will undo
you; sometimes, when you could say "To-day is Tuesday, the fifth of
August," you faint. There are so many parts of the body to look after,
one of the flock may slip your control while you are holding the other
by the neck. But Waker had his whole being in his hands, without so much
as clenching them.
When we had finished and Sister told me to wipe the sweat on his
forehead, I did so reluctantly, as though one were being too exacting in
drawing attention to so small a sign.
I must say that the dairyman seems to me quite mad, and I only wonder
how little it is noticed. He will sit in a chair beside Palmer for
hours, raising and lowering his eyebrows and fitting imaginary gloves on
to his fingers.
An inspecting general, pausing at his bed this morning, said: "A
dairyman, are you? Frightened of horses, are you? Then what do you do
about the cows?"
He was pleased with his own joke, and the dairyman smiled too,
uncomprehendingly, his eyebrows shooting up and down like swallows'
wings. Such jokes mean nothing to him; he is where no joke but his own
will ever please him any more....
Palmer doesn't like sitting near him, but since it is too much trouble
to move he allows it--poor Palmer, who has a piece of metal somewhere in
his brain and is never seen without one long hand to his aching head. He
said to me yesterday when I asked him which convalescent home he was
going to, "It doesn't matter. We both go to the same kind before
long...." jerking his thumb at the dairyman. As for the latter, there
surely can be no escape, but for Palmer....
"They won't take it out; too risky. Seen my X-ray picture?"
"No."
"You look at it. Right in the middle of the brain. Seems funny that if
I say I'm willing to risk it, why they shouldn't be."
"You're willing to risk it?"
"I'm only nineteen! What's the good of my head to me! I can't remember
the name of the last hospital I was at...."
Ah, these hurried conversations sandwiched between my duties, when in
four sentences the distilled essence of bitterness is dropped into my
ear!
"Sister, what will they do with Palmer?"
"They are going to discharge him. They won't operate."
"But what will happen to him?"
"I don't know."
"But if he is willing to risk his life to save his brain, can they still
refuse?"
"They won't operate."
Pinker is full of grains of knowledge. He has just discovered a
wonderful justification for not getting up directly he is told off for a
job.
"I never refuse a nurse," he said, as he thoughtfully picked over the
potatoes ("Li'l men, li'l spuds!" he says, to excuse himself for taking
all the sought-after small ones).... "I never refuse a nurse. But I like
to finish me game of draughts first--like Drake."
Pinker notices everything. He took the grocer for a ride on the tram
yesterday. "'E got so excited he got singing 'Tipperary,' an' the
blood-vessels on his neck goin' fit to burst. Weren't he, Bill?"
He appealed to Monk, whose name is George.
(By the way, I wonder when people will stop calling them "Tommy" and
call them "Bill." I never heard the word "Tommy" in a soldier's mouth:
he was a red-coated man. "But every mate's called 'Bill,' ain't 'e,
Bill?")
From the camp across the road the words of command float in through the
ward window.
"Halt!" and "Left wheel!" and "Right wheel!..."
They float into the ward bearing the sense of heat and dust, and of the
bumping of the saddle. The dairyman has perhaps put me a bit against the
camp across the road.
When the dressings are finished and we scrub the enamel bowls in the
annexe, one can see all the dairymen and all the plumbers, _chefs_ and
shopwalkers bumping up and down in a ring amid a cloud of dust, while
the voice of the sergeant cries out those things that my dairyman used
to think of in his sleep.
Then the jumps go up. "Left wheel!" "Right wheel!..." And now, "Cross
your stirrups!" One out of every four of them is clinging, grabbing,
swaying.
The seventh is off! It was a long fight.... He went almost round the
horse's neck before he fell.
We must win the war, win the war, win the war!
Every sort of price must be paid, every Mud of curious coinage--the
pennies and farthings of fear and despair in odd places, as well as the
golden coin of life which is spent across the water.
All day long the words of command come over the ward window-sills. All
day long they bump and shout and sweat and play that charade of theirs
behind the guns.
All day long little men training to fill just such another hospital as
ours with other little men.
But one does not say any longer, "What a strange thing is life!" for
only in rare moments does the divine astonishment return.
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