OLD GLORY AND
VERDUN
[Illustration:
_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._
_Copyright, 1918, by Underwood & Underwood, New York City._
_Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._
WHAT REMAINED OF A FRENCH FIELD HOSPITAL AFTER A
GERMAN INCENDIARY SHELL HIT IT.]
OLD GLORY AND
VERDUN
And Other Stories
BY
ELIZABETH FRAZER
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1918
Copyright, 1918, Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright, 1918, Duffield & Company
CONTENTS
PAGE
WARD EIGHTY-THREE 3
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED 39
MISS GREENHORN GOES A-NURSING 77
THE CHILDREN OF THE WAR ZONE 107
A CANTEENER IN FRANCE 143
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN 186
BEHIND CHÂTEAU-THIERRY 223
THE SPITE ATTACK 269
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
What Remained of a French Field Hospital After
a German Incendiary Shell Hit It _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Refugees from the Gassed Districts 110
The Commanding Officer of the Citadel of Verdun 188
Tent-Ward Showing Damage by German Bombs 270
OLD GLORY AND VERDUN
WARD EIGHTY-THREE
It was my first morning at the hospital. The clock in the _vestiaire_
stood at five minutes to eight. At eight I was to begin work. “Report
for duty” was the way the formal summons ran. I was to report to Ward
Eighty-three, the biggest, the heaviest and the most interesting ward
in the hospital. Mrs. Monroe, who had charge of the untrained and
unpaid volunteer nurses--or _auxiliaires_, as they are termed--had
told me to await her in the _vestiaire_. Accordingly I waited, feeling
awkward and strange and timid, like a Freshman on his first day at
college.
To say that I was nervous would be considerably understating the case.
Ever since entering the stone portal of the big American war hospital
that morning, I had been smitten with a deadly ague of fear--fear lest
in my abysmal ignorance I should do the wrong thing at the wrong time,
or fail to do the right thing at the right time, and a man should
die as the consequence--a man; a real, live, breathing man--one of
those gay, muscular, bright-eyed little boy soldiers of France, with
cigarettes perched rakishly behind their ears, that I had seen crowding
the streets of Paris on their brief _permissions_ from the Front!
Suddenly it came to me that fastening a handkerchief round the eyes
of a blinking but obliging friend was a vastly different affair
from fastening a firm, nonslippable bandage across the sockets of a
man whose eyes have been torn out by a ball. And how did one stop
a hemorrhage? You tied something somewhere. That was the extent of
my knowledge on that point. In the confusion of my mind, I had even
forgotten how to rescue a drowning man, a formula which has always
fascinated me and which I have memorized at intervals ever since the
age of ten, thinking that some day in such a fashion I might rescue
my future husband. In short, all the carefully acquired artificial
knowledge I had been able to absorb in a three-months’ First Aid Course
in New York, all the data, the neat lists of questions and answers, had
faded clean out of me, like a cheap dye, now that I was faced up with
the immediate and grim reality.
That course, and the light-heartedness with which I had pursued it,
seemed all at once to me very remote, irrelevant to the present
situation, and somehow like a joke in bad taste. I perceived, or I
believed I perceived, that I was in a false situation. I had no
business in that _vestiaire_, in that white uniform and coif. If at
that moment there had been a train waiting outside the _vestiaire_ door
bound for the Grand Central Station, I should have taken it without
a second’s hesitation. There being none, I consoled myself with the
reflection that, after all, I had not asked to come; that, on the
contrary, I had been sent for and urged to begin without delay, as
the hospital was undermanned at this summer-vacation season, and the
wounded were pouring in, a great steady stream, from the base hospitals.
Moreover, I should not be alone, like a sentinel on his post. Over me,
the _auxiliaire_, was the trained nurse; over the trained nurse was the
head nurse; over the head nurse was the doctor of the ward; over the
doctor was the assistant surgeon; over the assistant surgeon was the
chief surgeon, or _médicin chef_; and over all of us, interlocking us
together, was the French military system and the invisible but potent
Papa Joffre. So that if I, alone, could not stop a hemorrhage, I could
call my trained nurse; if she could not stop it, she could call the
head nurse; if the two of them could not stop it, they could call the
ward doctor; and if he could not stop it--but at this point I felt
myself on safe ground. The affair was out of my hands!
“Have you ever had to stop a hemorrhage?” I voiced my secret fear to
a young Englishwoman beside me, who was rapidly changing from her
civilian costume into the crisp white linen _infirmière’s_ blouse of
the wards.
“_Mon Dieu_, no!” She laughed as she pinned on her coif. “Not a chance,
with so many nurses round. You’ll have plenty of chance, though, to
wash their feet--those that still have feet,” she added soberly. “Is
this your first day?”
I nodded.
“And did you have any training--I mean any real training--before you
entered?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I took an examination in London; but the examiner
was so weary by the time he got to me that he merely said, ‘Have you
had the usual course?’ And when I replied ‘Yes,’ he simply passed me
through. But it doesn’t matter. You soon pick things up. What’s your
ward?”
“Eighty-three.”
She raised her brows at that and glanced at my feet.
“I hope you have comfortable shoes! That ward is the hardest in the
hospital--nothing but big primary cases; every single _blessé_ in bed.
You’ll have no chance to go to sleep at the switch,” she added with
a smile. “If your feet hurt to-night, rub them with cold cream, then
alcohol; and lie with them up on the footboard of your bed. It takes
the swelling out. Have you read the rules?” She waved her hand toward a
printed sheet tacked upon the wall, nodded and hurried off.
I faced round, feeling more than ever like a Freshman on his first day,
and read the following:
“AMERICAN AMBULANCE
“CONDITIONS FOR AUXILIARY SERVICE
“The _auxiliaires_ work under the trained nurses. They do not, as a
rule, attend at operations; nor do they do the dressings, although
they might be called upon to do a minor dressing, should the nurse
consider them sufficiently experienced. The hours are from eight
A. M. to six P. M. daily, with one whole day free one week, and
one afternoon free the following week. _Auxiliaires_ are asked to
stay three months at least; six months if possible. The service
is entirely voluntary, and _auxiliaires_ must meet all their own
expenses. Luncheon is provided at the Ambulance at a cost of 1.50
francs a meal----”
At this juncture the _vestiaire_ door opened again. I wheeled--I had
been wheeling every time it opened for the last ten minutes!--and Mrs.
Monroe’s brisk voice said:
“‘Ah, there you are! Sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ll just take you
to Miss Brooks, the head nurse of Salle Eighty-three, and she’ll tell
you where to begin.’”
Five minutes later introductions had been effected. Miss Brooks, who,
together with the doctor, two other nurses and an orderly, was bending
over a bed from which proceeded loud screams of “_Oh, là là! Oh, là
là!! Oh, là là!!! Bon Dieu! Doucement! Oh, là là!_” turned to the nurse
beside her and said briefly:
“Here’s your auxiliary, Miss Ransome. Is there anything she can start
on?”
Miss Ransome did not even glance up. She was holding, firmly grasped
in both hands, a man’s leg, stiffly extended, while the doctor lifted
pieces of gauze from what appeared to be a deep bloody and suppurating
crater in the thigh.
“One moment, please,” she murmured.
The dressing of the wound continued. The man renewed his high agonized
cries: “_Oh, là là! Oh, Nom d’un Nom! Doucement!_--Gently there!”
I stood aside and drew a deep breath. The quality of anguish in those
tones had already turned me pale. Later I was to learn to discriminate
between sounds of pain. There is the loud outcry of the man who is
not in extreme pain, but whose nerves have been so battered by shock,
exposure and continued strain that he is no longer master of himself.
Second, there is the scream of the man, also suffering from shock and
abnormally sensitive, who howls at the mere approach of the doctor.
And finally, there is the cry of the plucky soul, strong to endure,
but whose agony has passed the limit of human endurance. Such a cry,
bursting out across the ward, simply stampedes the nerves; heard
suddenly in the middle of the night it would fetch one out of bed in a
single leap, panic-stricken with horror; and even in a big hospital,
where innumerable sounds of pain blunt the ear, it still takes the
right of way, momentarily stilling the air. As the days went on I
was to learn these fine discriminations; but at present all screams
were alike to me. I gave each one full value, one hundred per cent of
anguish.
While the dressing proceeded I looked about me. Salle Eighty-three was
a spacious airy room, lofty-ceiled, with tessellated stone floors, and
long French windows on two sides. One set of windows gave upon the rear
of the building, and the other side opened on a charming French garden
round which the huge structure is built, one room deep, in the shape of
a hollow square. Inside the salle the beds were ranged round the four
sides and came halfway down the center, forming thus two passages that
were none too wide for the busy morning traffic.
Everyone, I perceived, was already working under a full head of steam.
Two doctors were in the ward, one on each side, and the dressings were
progressing steadily from bed to bed. A nurse preceded the doctors,
cutting down the bandages. The air was thick with cries and groans, the
cry of “_Doucement!_ Easy there!” prevailing high above all others like
a monotonous refrain. French military orderlies were hurrying about,
their arms piled high with stained linen; two blowzy-cheeked little
_femmes de chambre_ were down on their knees scrubbing the stone floor,
their tongues and their _sabots_ clattering together. Ahead of them
a bent old woman, with a great red hooked nose and a wide toothless
smile, hideous as one of Shakespere’s witches, was passing from bed to
bed, gathering up the cigarette butts, chaffing the men and exchanging
with them jests as broad as they were good-natured.
It was evident she was a prime favorite, for it was “_Grand’mère!_”
“_Grand’mère!_” straight down the line, and chuckles followed in the
wake of her sallies like bubbles on a stream. Here and there patients
able to sit up in bed had removed their _chemises_ and were soaping
their chests with gusto. These _Grand’mère_ favored with take-offs on
their manly beauty. Bursts of laughter punctuated her hits.
“Here are your men,” said Miss Ransome, joining me--“these twelve.
You’re not responsible for the others. Suppose you begin with Claudius
there. Wash him. Rub his back with alcohol. Then make his bed. Watch
out for his broken leg!” she cautioned.
And she nodded toward that unfortunate member, which, swathed as stiff
as that of a mummy and dotted with numerous little rubber tubes that
sprouted up through the bandages like unnatural flowers, was swung out
upon an extension and held taut by a jungle of pulleys and bags and
weights.
“He’s had a hard time,” she continued in a lowered voice. “What with
losing his eye and getting his leg infected--you see, he lay wounded
four days and four nights on the battlefield, without water, before he
was finally rescued--he’s had a tough pull. For weeks we thought he
would die. But he fooled us all--didn’t you, Claudius?”
As she spoke English, the boy did not understand. He lay regarding
her with a bright dark eye, all the brighter for the black patch
which covered its companion; and finally he asked in tones of weary
politeness:
“You said, mees?”
“Change all his linen,” she pursued unheeding. “He can raise himself an
inch or two. When he’s finished, go straight down the line and do the
same to the others. I can’t help you much this morning.”
And she hurried away, leaving me with my first task--to wash the back
and change the entire bed linen of a man who could not stir more than
an inch or two without exquisite pain!
“_Bonjour_,” I said by way of commencement. “_Comment ça va?_--How goes
it?”
“Bad. Very bad. That imbecile pig of a leg! Not a moment’s rest did it
give me last night. Cramp, cramp, cramp!” He clenched and unclenched
his fist with nervous irritability to indicate the nature of the pain,
while the flare of crimson in his thin cheeks testified to a heightened
temperature. “I wish you’d cut it off to-night,” he growled, “and stand
it over in the corner.”
“I will--with my scissors,” I promised. “And to-morrow, if it’s been
good, we’ll fasten it back on with safety pins.”
“You needn’t bother,” he grinned.
With many gaspings and painful grimaces he got hold of an overhead
hand grip, dug his head deep into the pillow and managed to raise
himself until his back described a parabola perhaps two inches above
the bed. “Quick! Quick!” he commanded breathlessly. I washed him as
best I could. Afterward I glanced up at the chart hanging behind his
bed and read there: “Simondon, Claudius. Age, 21. Wounded May 25, 1916.
Admitted June 7, 1916.” Claudius, aged twenty-one, had already white
hairs in his head, and his slight figure was shrunken and yellow and
dry, like that of a little old man. At the same time there was about
him something unquenchably boyish and debonair, which made one wish to
weep.
“Have you ever been in a charge?” I asked, to divert his attention.
“Yes; ten of them. Not interesting! Not interesting at all! You stand
there in a trench, water up to your knees, holding your gun and waiting
for the order. You are cold, and still you perspire. You tremble with
agitation. Maybe you stand thus for hours. Or you climb over the
parapet and run. If the Boches retreat, yes, then it is interesting.
If they come on, no, not interesting. Not interesting at all!” And
he looked up at me with his sardonic grin. “War,” he added, “is the
stupidest game that a fellow with wits can play at.”
A minute later he confided to me that he was to receive a decoration.
He was to receive the Croix de Guerre.
“But that is fine!” I exclaimed.
“Ah, you think so?” jeered Claudius. “It’s very fine, without doubt;
but as for me, I’d rather have my eye than that pretty little medal
hung on my chest. Can I see the world with that little medal? _Zut!_ I
prefer my eye--thanks.”
For the moment his nonchalance completely deceived me. It was not
until several days later when I came upon him unobserved, poring over
the official notice of his decoration, and caught the look of pride,
of emotion in the young face, that I really got the matter straight.
Twenty-one is twenty-one the world over, and always hides its loves.
After washing Claudius and rubbing his back with alcohol, I made his
bed. In France the bed is a sacred institution and the making of one
is not a proper subject for jest. But I am not jesting when I say that
the ordinary, casually made American bed, with its opportunities for
ventilation and its light loose covers which one may kick joyously down
to the foot in the morning, would fill the average Frenchwoman with
amazement and scorn.
A French bed is something in the nature of a cocoon, with a hole
in the upper right-hand corner, into which one artfully insinuates
oneself at night, and from which one artfully disengages oneself in the
morning. All apertures, save the small one at the top, are hermetically
sealed--so tightly are the sheets drawn under the mattress, so smoothly
are the covers laid on, so exquisitely are the corners mitered. One is
all but sewed into bed.
To make such a bed is to produce a work of art, a creation. Thus, Jean
and Marie made my bed every morning at the hotel, folding on each layer
as close as the successive skins of an onion, while I watched them with
respectful admiration. Once, feeling too warm in the middle of the
night, I tried to remove a blanket. I struggled until four o’clock the
next morning. Next time I am going to send for professional wreckers.
But the making of such a bed is, after all, a comparatively simple
affair--for I am not in it! Let us denominate it Class C in order of
difficulty. Class B is the making of such a bed with an occupant, but
an occupant who can help himself--stir about. Class A is the making of
such a bed with an immovable man in it; a man, moreover, attached to a
network of apparatus--cords, pulleys, overhead weights and drains, all
in such delicate adjustment that to jar any of them will wrench a cry
of torture from the occupant.
To this last class belonged the bed of Claudius. When, after
three-quarters of an hour’s labor, punctuated by many exclamations of
“_Doucement! Doucement!_” I straightened myself, Claudius was rather
white and I was perspiring freely. Still, that bed was made--it really
should be written Made!--and I surveyed it proudly. The lower sheet in
particular had been difficult to dispose properly. To me it appeared
at least twice too long for the mattress, and in the end I had simply
wadded up the extra yards of length and tucked them under the pillows.
It was during this latter operation when Justin, the orderly, came
upon me. Justin is a squat, grotesque little old man, with the head
of a gargoyle set on powerful Atlas-like shoulders. Being an orderly
is his _métier_. He has been one in a French military hospital for
twenty years, which is to say that Justin is a very wise man. I believe
he could give points to Solomon, for Solomon was not a Frenchman. He
regarded my bungling efforts for a moment in silence, and then said in
tones of grave reproach:
“Ah, mademoiselle, it is not thus we make a bed in France! Permit me.”
Saying which, he stripped the bed bare to the mattress and made it
afresh, with the subtle perfection of Jean and Marie. My crumpled
undersheet was drawn taut as a drumhead. Followed in swift succession
the drawsheet, the top sheet and the blankets, smooth as rose petals
and as firmly fixed.
Where, meantime, was Claudius, with his weak back, his smashed leg and
his jungle of apparatus? Not a single cry had escaped him. A glance
showed his thin dark face alight with amusement as he watched old
Justin teach the strange “mees” how to make a bed with a live Frenchman
in it.
“_V’là!_” said Justin, straightening himself. “That’s the way we make a
bed in France!” And he padded noiselessly off in his battered blue list
slippers; it had taken him exactly six minutes by the ward clock.
The next bed, when I turned down the covers, revealed a patient whose
linen was saturated and stiff with blood. Another undersheet to
manipulate!
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” came a faint moan from the pillows.
“Where are you wounded?” I inquired, for this is the first fact a maker
of beds must determine.
“Both legs broken below the knees,” was the feeble reply.
“Don’t stop to do him now,” said Miss Ransome, approaching the bed.
“He’s just been brought in and is going up for operation. You can make
his bed while he is away. Look at those feet!” she exclaimed, pointing.
I looked. Beneath the caked and dried blood from his wounds the mud of
the Somme was ground into his skin until it was blackened as if from
powder.
“Some of them are worse than that!” said she. “Last week there came
in to us a little _poilu_, straight from the first-line trenches of
Verdun. How long he had been without a wash even he himself did not
know. The doctor gave one long-range sniff and said hastily: ‘Send him
to the baths!’ It seemed, however, that he was not acquainted with
baths--at least not in the ‘all-together’ and in an American bathtub;
for the attendants said that he fought like a wild cat--and when he
came back he was crying! He had faced the cannon at Verdun; he had
been smashed to pieces by a shell, and had his leg cut off up to his
thigh with only a local anæsthetic without flinching; but he wept with
fear at sight of an American bath and demanded to be sent back to the
trenches!”
The bedmaking went on, somewhat raggedly to be sure, for on those first
days I was obsessed by an absurd and fantastic fear that sometime when
I pulled away the drawsheet I should pull away also a mangled leg upon
it. There was one bed, however, which I grew to enjoy making, and that
was the bed of Grandpère--fat, dirty, profane, cross-grained, whimsical
old Grandpère. He was notorious in the ward as a grouch. Claudius
declared that he had been jilted in love and had had the “black
butterflies” ever since. He was what is known as an endless-chain
smoker. He lighted one cigarette from the end of another and kept
going the entire day through, with the result that his _chemise_ front
was always full of little burnt holes and powdered thick with ashes.
Nor was his bed much better. One swept out of it each morning aluminum
filings, chunks of bread, apple parings, handkerchiefs, books,
nutshells, letters, as well as innumerable little pillows and pads
with which Grandpère combated the hated “currents of air” from the
open windows. The fact was, he got no peace day or night from a badly
infected leg, and sometimes he was hard driven for diversion.
Between him and a certain substitute nurse in the ward there
existed a violent and mutual antipathy. She was an excellent nurse
professionally, but hard, brusque in manner, and without a single
word of French to build a bridge of sympathy between herself and
her patients, among whom she was known as the old _mitrailleuse_.
Between her and Grandpère was waged a fierce battle each morning over
the making of his bed. She lectured him roundly in English for his
untidiness, and Grandpère retorted volubly in French, with a vocabulary
that would have enchanted a cow-puncher. She was displeased with the
state of his _chemises_, and Grandpère was highly displeased with her
displeasure.
“What is she saying, the old _mitrailleuse_?” he would whisper to me,
his little gray eyes gleaming with mischievous humor. “Why has she
always the great anger?”
“She says you smoke too much--that your bed is full of trash.”
“But, _mon Dieu_, that is my sole distraction! And what else?”
“She says you burn holes in your _chemise_ and that it is always
covered with ashes.”
“But--my word!--does she know nothing, then, of the laws of Nature--the
old Anglaise!--that ashes always tumble downward, not upward; and that
fire always burns? Can I make the ashes go upward into the air? I am
not God. I am only a Frenchman.”
An hour later he would beckon me secretly over to his side, point to a
fresh perforation of his _chemise_, a fresh sprinkling of ashes, and
whisper gleefully:
“Tell the old _mitrailleuse_ to come and sweep me out again!”
He enjoyed the encounters! And as they were, indeed, his sole
distraction through weary days, I sometimes humored him.
The dressings, meantime, continued, with their unceasing accompaniment
of groans and cries of “_Doucement!_” A young surgeon told me that
_doucement_ was the first French word he acquired; and undeniably it
is the word oftenest heard during the dressings period. This does not
signify that the patients are, as a rule, given to outcry. On the
contrary, these young Frenchmen endure the intensest pain with a kind
of smiling white fortitude that brings a furtive tear to the eye.
Let me take, for example, the demeanors of the three whose beds are
on a little sleeping porch on the terrace--Claudius, François, Emile.
Their being on the terrace carries its own significant hint of special
weakness. Of these three, Claudius, when under extreme stress, shuts
tightly his one eye, thrusts his knuckles into his mouth and bites them
until they bleed. If the pain has shaken him unendurably, when the
doctor and the nurses depart he puts a pillow over his face and weeps
into it silently.
François, on the other hand, an idyllically handsome aristocratic youth
of twenty-one, with a smashed arm and leg, takes an opposite course.
He looks his pain squarely in the face as if it were an adversary,
with an assumption of nonchalant scorn. Under a particularly painful
dressing or probe his eyes grow steely and narrow, while his lips
under the little golden brown mustache begin to smile sternly. As the
pain increases, that smile becomes more distinct, more contemptuous
and challenging. I have a notion that secretly François loves pain for
the opportunity it affords him to test the fine unblunted steel of his
young courage.
Emile, a Breton lad of twenty-two, with a ball through his lungs, has
a different reaction. He hoists himself painfully up in bed, stares
out upon the garden with his mystical blue eyes, coughs, winces; and
at the end he lays himself down again, gasping, and says gently, “Sank
you, mees!” That is all, a soft “Sank you, mees!” spoken in English to
please me! Of those three reactions Emile’s is the hardest to bear.
In lively contrast to these is the conduct of Grandpère. Grandpère no
longer has any romantic illusions to sustain, no youthful reticences.
The first article in his creed is that if you suffer pain you should
yell. If it makes you feel better, begin to yell beforehand. And curse!
Use all the powers of protest the good God has given you. Accordingly
from the first to the last moment of a dressing he lets himself out, so
to speak, and the entire ward chuckles over his choice list of epithets.
But, despite the amount of concentrated pain that it holds, the big
airy ward is much more a place of laughter than of depression and
gloom. When the dressings are finished, and the aftermath of painful
throbbing has died down, the natural life and vivacity of fifty
Frenchmen reassert themselves. They banter and chaff each other and
discuss every discussible or undiscussible subject under the sun.
Naturally the present struggle comes in for the lion’s share of debate;
nor is the feeling concerning it by any means unanimous. In that small
bedfast community are ardent imperialists, conservatives, radicals,
syndicalists and philosophic anarchists; and each one of them takes a
hack at the great conflict from his own angle of vision. Nor have they
within them the hate for the German that seems to animate some of the
spectators on the side lines. At any rate he is not a monster; in
fact, one was forced to believe from their many stories of good will
that the average German was really almost human!
“What do you think of the Germans?” a young soldier asked me suddenly
one day as I was taking his temperature.
“Their methods, you mean? I thought there were no two opinions on that.”
“Very well!” he retorted. “Then you take the French side and I’ll take
the German side, and we’ll discuss the subject. Begin, if you please.”
“No; you begin!” I said, rather curious to hear what a wounded
Frenchman would have to say in defense of his foe.
He talked for ten minutes, brilliantly, earnestly, caustically, holding
the thermometer like a cigarette in one corner of his mouth; and at the
end of that time he had proved not indeed that the Germans were right,
but that war itself was so intrinsically degrading and hellish--despite
what romanticists might say to the contrary of its elevating spiritual
effect on the soul--that it exerted a debasing influence on whoever
engaged in it, be he German, French, English, Russian or American.
“War is a rotten business for the individual,” he wound up soberly.
“And don’t let them sidetrack you by saying it’s the Germans. They’re
not monsters. It’s war itself that’s the monster. It’s a bad microbe.
A mean little soul it poisons, and a big soul it poisons also. The
physical wounds--like this,” he touched his bandaged shoulder--“you can
see. The wounds on the soul are invisible. But, believe me, they exist
just the same, and are even more ghastly. I know!” And he handed back
the thermometer with a smile.
The real word-battles, however, take place between themselves.
Sometimes an argument lasts for weeks, and they have a go at it every
fine afternoon, wrestling with each other like the conversational
experts they are. Sometimes it is only a brief but hot dispute. It
was one of the latter that took place about a month after my arrival,
between François and Claudius. That particular afternoon a concert was
impending. It was to be given in the garden by a crack Belgian military
band, and programs had just been handed round.
Claudius looked over his card and I saw his expressive face darken.
“The Marseillaise isn’t down!” he exclaimed. “If they haven’t the
courtesy to play the French national air to wounded French soldiers in
a French military hospital, I, for one, shall not listen to their old
concert. I shall sleep!”
Saying which, he scornfully tossed the program over into the garden and
composed himself for slumber. But François, who was feeling gay that
day, could not permit such a remark to pass.
“I don’t think so highly of that Marseillaise!” he remarked languidly,
but with the light of battle in his eyes. “It’s not a good song. On the
contrary, it’s a very bad song.”
Claudius’ one eye popped wide open. He fairly leaped into the combat.
“What!” he exclaimed, flushing with anger. “You say the Marseillaise is
not a good song? You say this is not good?” And, propping himself up on
one elbow, his eye still blazing, he chanted the immortal battle cry:
“‘_Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu’un sang impur,
Abreuve nos sillons._’
“_Voilà!_” cried Claudius, his voice shaky with emotion. “You dare to
say that is not a good song?”
“Ah, the music’s all right,” admitted François loftily. “It’s the
words.”
“And what’s the matter with the words? Why aren’t they good?”
“Why?” said François coolly. “Because they incite to carnage! ‘_Formez
vos bataillons!_’ But what for? To kill somebody! No, no; such words
are not good.”
The irrefutable logic of this, Claudius chose to ignore.
“You are not a true Frenchman,” he declared scornfully.
François began to smile--the cold distinct smile of the dressing hour.
He glanced round for a weapon. A cup of wine stood on his bedside
table. His fingers closed round it.
“Say that again!” he remarked pleasantly.
Claudius’ hand had likewise gripped his wineglass. Of the two he was
much more passionate. He glared hardily and began:
“You’re not a----”
The head nurse appeared opportunely on the threshold.
“François,” she said severely, “you know you mustn’t drink that wine
when you’re going up for operation!”
François looked at the nurse, at me, at the wine in his cup, and from
thence to Claudius, who by now was grinning broadly.
“I wasn’t going to drink it,” he observed mildly. “I was going to give
it to the _camarade_, there!”
And he proffered it gravely to Claudius, who drank it down with equal
politeness; then suddenly both of them tumbled back on their pillows
and went off into boyish little yips of laughter under the startled
eyes of the nurse. And, to finish off the episode, the Belgian band
really played the Marseillaise after all.
The first few weeks I was in the ward we were enlivened each morning
by the performance of Clarice. Clarice was a hen; and every day, at
precisely ten o’clock, she laid an egg. It happened in this way: There
was a young one-armed soldier, an opera singer before the war, who, for
the amusement of his companions, would lie upon his bed and with his
voice conjure all the animals of the farmyard into lively existence.
The deep growl of the watchdog, the grunting of a pig, the whickering
of horses down in the meadow, the lordly crow of the cock, the busy
cackling of the hen--he reproduced them all with startling realism. The
hen, in particular, he loved to delineate.
The sound would start suddenly under one of the hospital beds--the
low Tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! of a hen talking softly to herself as she
scratched in the hay.
“Sh! It’s Clarice! She’s going to lay an egg!” somebody would cry; and
all the ward held its breath during the operation.
After a period of soft clucking--Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck, tuck,
tuck, tuck!--which Clarice required to dispose herself suitably and
discreetly upon her nest, a profound silence ensued. Clarice was laying
her egg! The men lay perfectly still, smiling expectantly, glancing now
and again at the clock. The hush was absolute. It was Clarice’s moment.
Presently a loud, triumphant cackle issued forth: Tuck-tuck,
tuck-a-tuck, tuck-tuck, tuck-a-tuck! The egg was an accomplished fact.
And Clarice, her proud duty done, flew straight to her lord and
master, who added his crow of patronizing approbation. The illusion of
the performance was perfect, and little Clarice was a source of great
delight to the men, who built round her all sorts of romances.
“That’s our little Clarice!” Emile explained to me the first time I
heard her. “But she is admirable, that Clarice! She lays an egg each
morning; and we give it to a sick _camarade_ for his _déjeuner_!”
By the time the beds are made, clean bandages adjusted, vacant beds
disinfected, the individual tables scrubbed and hot drinks fetched from
the diet kitchen, the day is well under way. The dressings, meantime,
proceed steadily down the ward. Sometimes, after a new offensive, when
the big war hospital has received a fresh influx of the wounded, every
bed contains a battered wreck, these dressings fill the entire morning
and continue straight through the afternoon.
Those are trying days for heart and head and feet. Through all the
hours the busy stream of traffic flows constantly through this, the
heaviest ward. There are men going up to operations on stretchers; men
coming down from operations, unconscious, on stretchers; men being
discharged, with their meager little sack of possessions, also on
stretchers. Good-bys are shouted--“_Bon voyage!_” “All aboard!” “_En
voiture!_” Or the orderly enters with a batch of letters--letters from
home.
“Simondon!” he bawls cheerily.
“Present!”
“Girod!”
“Present!”
“Coussin!”
“Discharged!” a voice volunteers.
“Morel!... Morel!... Morel?”
“Give me that letter,” says the head nurse quietly, for Morel cannot
receive it; Morel is dead.
At about half past ten, when the ward is in fair order, and the
_blessés_ under their fresh linen look like rows of good children in
bed, the _médicin chef_, or chief surgeon, makes his rounds. As he
approaches a bed its occupant salutes, and then listens with intense
concentration to the strange English jargon of the ward doctor, who is
making his daily report. Perhaps he catches the word “operation”--which
every soldier knows. After the surgeon has passed he beckons and
whispers eagerly:
“What did he say? What did the _médicin chef_ say? Operation?”
I nod. “Only a little one. But no lunch to-day. No good _pinard_!”
_Pinard_ is the trench slang for wine, corresponding to the English
“booze.” That word, upon my lips, will nearly always bring a laugh from
a _poilu_. But no laugh greets me this time. He sinks back upon his
pillow, a little white and very quiet. The day has suddenly lost its
color for him.
After the great _médicin chef_--or God, as he is irreverently termed
in the ward--has departed, with his halo of dread, _déjeuner_ is
the next important feature of the day. Serving a community of fifty
a three-course meal--soup, meat and vegetables, and dessert--is a
man-size proposition. Serving it on bed tables, often cutting up the
food and feeding the armless patients, further complicates the task.
The first day I completely lost my head. My clamorous young brood, nine
of whom were under twenty-two, reminded me of nothing so much as a
nestful of yawping baby robins waiting to be fed.
It was: “Look out for my leg, mees!” “More bread, mees!” “My
_serviette_, mees!” “Have you forgotten me, mees?” “My God, my soup’s
tipped into my bed! I’m afloat, mees!” And all in a rapid bubble
of French that made my head spin. At last, in sheer desperation, I
addressed them in the American language: “You darned kids--shut up!” As
was usual in those first days, it was old Justin who came to my aid and
disentangled me.
The patients’ _déjeuner_ over, the _auxiliaires_ have three-quarters
of an hour off for their own, which they may get at the hospital or
at some of the neighboring _pâtisseries_. As for me, that first day I
choked down a few mouthfuls and then retired to the _vestiaire_ to rest
my feet.
The afternoon was cut off the same piece of cloth as the morning--more
beds, more dressings, more bandages, more high shrill cries, more
gayety and laughter. But about four o’clock in the afternoon something
began to happen. It began to happen in bed Number Ten. Its occupant,
a handsome dark lad of eighteen, had a gangrenous arm, the sight of
which, with its deep gashes to let out the poison, turned one faint
with horror. All the morning, at intervals, I had held a basin while he
retched, or fetched hot-water bottles.
About four o’clock he began to babble of his mother, his brothers and
sisters, and his home in the country. He laughed, chatted, cried out
“_Maman!_” repeatedly, and tried to rise to go to her. Presently it was
found necessary to strap his supple, strong young body to the mattress.
At the time I had not the faintest notion that he was already in the
antechamber of death, so alive he was, so palpitant with restless
energy.
Suddenly he lay still. I had turned to get another hot-water bottle.
“Never mind!” said the nurse, and at some quality in her voice I
paused, startled, and looked again. He was gone. His passing had been
as light and unpretentious as a breath of air through the open window.
After he was carried out I disinfected his bed and made it afresh, in a
strange convulsion of soul. Thus I had my first glimpse of that vast,
interminable procession which must haunt the dreams of ambitious kings.
As yet, I have been to no battlefronts. I have letters, to be sure,
which if presented in the proper quarters, I am told, would result in
personally conducted trips to lines not engaged in an actual offensive.
But those letters still lie, unsent, in my trunk. I may use them some
day. But at present there is within me a reluctance to visiting ruins
and battlefields. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many ruins who
have returned from those battlefields.
Moreover, I have already been to the Front and I have made a charge. It
was a hand-grenade charge, under the leadership of one Sergeant Girod,
who since then has been awarded the Croix de Guerre. The announcement
of the award reads, “For conspicuous bravery in leading a brilliant
hand-grenade attack against the enemy while under fire from our own
_mitrailleuses_.” I know it was a brilliant attack, for I made it with
him. It happened in this way:
It was six o’clock in the evening, and the big _salle_, with its forest
of overhead apparatus, was wrapped in warm darkness, through which
the bright, glowing ends of cigarettes bloomed like tiny stars. The
electricity was out of order and the sole lights--two tall candles on
the head nurse’s desk in the middle of the room, with their straight
still flames--lent an air of enchantment to the place. The men, their
suppers over, lay smoking tranquilly, or chatted in undertones. To
me it was the pleasantest hour of the day. I had lingered to make up
another bed, the occupant for which, a fresh arrival, had not yet come
down from the operating room.
“Can you stay a few minutes?” called the head nurse as she hurried past
me. “I am called away; the nurses are down at first supper, and someone
should be here when your man arrives.”
I promised to remain. A few minutes later the big double doors were
flung open and a dark jumbled mass appeared. The same instant a loud
shout shattered the quiet gloom:
“_En avant, mes enfants! Vive la France! En avant! Toujours en avant!
Ils approchent! Les Boches! Les infidels! Les brigands! Ils approchent
à gauche! Regardez à gauche! A gauche!_--They’re approaching on the
left! Look out on the left--_En avant, mes enfants! Toujours en avant!_”
It was a shout that would send a thrill along a dead man’s spine. A
ripple of laughter went round the room. Raised heads peered eagerly.
The _brancardiers_ came forward, two wheeling the stretcher and two
more holding down the occupant, who was struggling convulsively to
raise himself and shouting hoarse commands in a voice that could be
heard a block away.
“Where does he go, mees?” came Justin’s steady tones.
“Here--Bed Eight.”
“_En avant! En avant, mes enfants! Regardez à gauche! A gauche! Ils
approchent à gauche! Les Boches, ils approchent!_” The hoarse shouts
did not cease for an instant.
“He’s leading a charge,” said Justin, grimly pleased, as they paused
beside me. “Hand grenades! He’s a terrible fellow. He killed ten Boches
coming down the stairs!”
Then, all together, with a “_Un, deux, trois--Allez!_” the four lifted
him from the stretcher into bed.
He was a powerfully built man, fair, with blue eyes and a blond
mustache, and his _chemise_, torn away in the struggle, revealed a
torso that gleamed like ivory. Suddenly he looked up and gripped me
with a hand of iron.
“_Criez avec moi: ‘Vive la France!’_”
“_Vive la France!_” I repeated in a low voice, to soothe him.
“Louder! Shout louder: ‘_Vive la France!_’”
“_Vive la France!_” I said more loudly. “Lie still now. It’s over. The
attack is finished.”
“And the Boches?” he queried eagerly. “They are gone?”
“All gone.”
“No, no!” he cried violently, trying to rise. “They’re not gone!
They’re still coming on! My God, see them! Wave on wave! _Regardez à
gauche, mes enfants! Les Boches! Les brigands!_ Ah, my poor comrades!”
he murmured. “See them fall!” He turned to me, whom evidently he took
for one of his grenadiers: “Citronne went down just then. Did you see
him? Was he killed?”
“No; only wounded. Be quiet now. It’s done.”
“But not well done,” he retorted impatiently. “We hadn’t enough balls.
To-night we attack again. Listen well!”
And then he gave me my orders. It appeared that on each side of us were
Moroccan troops who were to follow our attack with a charge. For a few
minutes Girod was silent. Suddenly he broke out:
“Boom! _Soixante-quinze!_”--the French seventy-fives. “Boom! _Les
canons!_” He appeared to be listening to the bombardment. Presently he
sighed. “Ah, my poor wife! My poor Cécilie! You know, I have a wife and
three children--two boys and a girl.”
It was evident to me that the sergeant had a presentiment that he was
going to fall in the attack. After a long silence his voice came to me
abruptly out of the dark:
“What time is it?”
I named the hour.
“Well, then, my friend, we have still ten minutes. Let us smoke a
cigarette before we part.” A second later he was shouting at the top of
his powerful voice:
“_En avant, mes enfants! Ils approchent! Les Boches! Regardez à gauche!
A gauche!_”
Over and over he issued his commands to his grenadiers; over and over
he shouted his warning cry, calling frantically for bombs that were
not forthcoming; and always he was driven back, despairing, by the tide
of Germans on his left. His brain, like a talking-machine record, had
recorded faithfully every detail of that last wild, brilliant attack,
terminating so disastrously because of the shortage of balls; and in
his delirium he played that one record ceaselessly, with no thought,
action or sensation omitted. But as the hours went by the record played
slowly and more slowly, with gaps of silence in between. Finally he
slept.
There is another chapter to add to this episode concerning Girod. It
happened some three weeks later. And as this is not fiction, but a
plain reporting of facts, I hasten to add that Girod did not die.
Passing his bed, however, one afternoon, I laid my hand casually on
the iron bed-frame. It was trembling. The entire bed was vibrating
steadily, gently, as if to the oscillation of some remote earthquake.
Astonished, I looked at Girod. And Girod was trembling too. It was he
who caused the tremor of the bed. Beneath the white coverlet his big
body shook with a ceaseless, mysterious agitation.
“What is the matter?” I cried. “Why are you trembling like that?”
He gave a faint, apologetic smile.
“I’m afraid!” he said simply. “I’m afraid of that operation this
afternoon.”
“But it’s nothing,” I assured him--“really nothing at all. Only a
slight incision in the shoulder.”
“I know. But--I’m afraid! You see----” He broke off, knitting his
brows. “It was not always thus. Once I did not know what fear
was--before---- That’s why they made me leader of the bombing squad. I
was reckless. But now--I’m afraid. I’m afraid of that little operation!”
“You’ve been under a strain,” I said.
I recalled Girod’s history. He had narrated it to me one rainy
afternoon. From his wife, Cécilie, and his three children, he had
not heard a word since the war opened, as they lived in the invaded
territory. For the last six weeks before he was wounded he and his
comrades had been in the first-line trenches, unrelieved, without food
save for their reserve stores; and without water, unless one crawled
on one’s belly at night to a spring in the dangerous strip of No Man’s
Land between them and the enemy’s trenches.
Each night he crawled to the spring, filled his canteen and crawled
back to his wounded companions. And then came one night when the spring
failed.
“I crawled out there, as usual,” Girod related, “and found it full of
cadavers!”
“And after that?” I persisted.
But Girod made no reply.
“It’s the strain, the heavy strain,” I said again.
A nurse--the one known as the _mitrailleuse_--at that instant passed
his bed.
“What’s the matter with him?” she demanded brusquely. “What’s he
shaking for?”
“The operation,” I said. “He fears it. It’s the strain he’s been under
so long----”
“Pooh!” she broke out impatiently. “Some of these men can’t stand pain
any better than a baby!”
As the days and the weeks go by the ward changes. Men recover or die,
or are discharged to convalescent hospitals; and fresh wrecks appear in
their places, sleep in their beds, and smile up to one from the pillow.
The big _salle_ is an antechamber, with exits leading both ways--out
into the great adventure of life and out into the still greater
adventure of death. At the end of three months scarcely a single
familiar face remains. But the exit leading back into life is always
open. The recovered men return.
An aviator, whose leg had been amputated at the hospital, comes to
announce that he is to have the honor of returning to the Front. He is
the last of his class of eight--and he must fly with a wooden leg.
Even Claudius has been discharged. He has gone home to his mother and
sister, of whom he is the sole support. A letter from him lies before
me.
“My leg is no good,” he writes, “and I never shall be able to use it
to work. What shall I do? I shall have to ride that leg all day in a
carriage! But where am I to get the carriage? I shall go to America! Do
you think some rich--and pretty--young American mees would marry me
and let me ride in her carriage?”
That, indeed, would be a solution for Claudius! And I am making his
modest wants known, with the hopes that some pretty--and rich--young
American “mees” may wish to take a flyer on a young Frenchman,
considerably smashed but with his sense of humor intact. If she should,
and can guarantee the carriage, I will send her Claudius’ address.
WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED
Every hour wounds;
The last one kills.
_Old French Couplet on the Clock Tower of the American
Ambulance, at Neuilly._
When, one morning in Paris, I received orders to report without delay
to the big American war hospital in Neuilly, and begin work there
as a volunteer nurse’s aid, I suddenly found myself reluctant, even
rebellious; though it was precisely for that reason, and no other,
that I had come to France. But I had just arrived in Paris and already
that city of enchantments had cast its spell on me. I did not want
to work--I never want to work. I wanted, I scarcely knew what: to
taste Paris again; to breathe her air, which affects one like a
mild champagne; to stroll about and enjoy her noble proportions and
beautiful distances. I did not wish to be swallowed up immediately by
another piece of work, no matter how fine or inspiring.