to do first; I wanted to revisit the tomb of Napoleon and ask the
little old gentleman reposing down there below what he thought of the
present situation; I wanted to renew acquaintance with Rodin’s statue,
The Thinker, in front of the Panthéon, to see whether it cast as big
a shadow as ever; I wanted to wander through the leafy alleys of the
Luxembourg Garden, decorated with marble gods and goddesses and given
over to the naïve delights of student lovers; I wanted to stroll once
more up the Champs-Elysées in the twilight and see the Arc de Triomphe,
gravely beautiful, looming solidly against the sky; I wanted to view
again the statue of Jeanne d’Arc; I wanted to taste once more some
Vouvray and see whether the world would turn into an enchanted bubble
again; I wanted to discover whether the same immemorial fishermen were
still fishing on the banks of the Seine--for dead cats, Mark Twain
declared. These are but seven samples of the things I wanted to do. In
brief, I wanted to loaf.
“But you can’t!” said the crisp English nurse executive at the
hospital, to whom I confided these noble ambitions. “In the first
place, we need you. In the second place, we’ve got to have you. And
in the third place, Paris just now is no place for loafers. With this
present offensive on and so many of our staff completely worn out--do
you know there are women working here who have not had a day off in
twenty months?--we need every pair of hands that are available. Now,
when can you come? Monday?”
This was Wednesday, and there was a nurse’s outfit to buy,
matriculation papers to procure at the Préfecture, and other odds
and ends of official red tape to tie, which would take every hour of
my time. But I was conquered. I acquiesced. My hopes of a holiday
went a-glimmering. Hereafter, what I see of Paris in wartime will be
hasty glimpses, caught on the fly; for it will be dark when I rise,
at six-thirty, button myself into my _infirmière’s_ blouse, swallow
my morning draft of chicory _au lait_, whose sole virtue is that it
is so hot it scalds me all the way down; and it is dark again when in
the evening, at six-thirty, the day’s work done, I bundle into the Red
Cross omnibus, which takes the auxiliary workers back to the Subway.
During the first week in the hospital the sheer physical strain was
terrific. It seemed as if I were in a strange, mad, nightmare world,
where everything was reversed; instead of health--disease, and mangled
and torn bodies and suppurating wounds, some of them hideously green
and yellow, like decayed meat; and smashed wrecks of men, with arms and
legs swung up on apparatus that resembled nothing so much as the old
torture racks of the Inquisition; as if shrieks and cries and groans
and smells were the natural and normal order of things. For days I
was nauseated. The sight of raw mangled flesh, the blood-saturated
linen, the stench of gangrenous wounds, the nervous strain of bandaging
freshly amputated stumps, and the screams of the dressing hour simply
bombarded the unaccustomed senses and hit the newcomer fairly in the
pit of the stomach. When I confessed this to the ward surgeon he
laughed.
“That’s nothing--the rebellion of healthy nature against disease. When
I was at the Front, at the commencement of the war, at one of the base
hospitals, I used to retire and gag at regular intervals. It was awful,
for we had nothing to work with. But mobilize your emotions. Don’t let
them mobilize you. Imitate the sang-froid of the _poilu_. Yesterday I
stopped by the bed of a youngster who’s had a leg off and is dying of
gangrene. ‘Well, how goes it?’ I asked him. ‘_Ça va. Ça va mieux._’--It
goes. It goes better, he replied simply. And he was dead up to his
waist already! He was a dead man he knew it, and he knew that I knew
that he knew it; and still he looked me straight in the eye and said
‘It goes. It goes better!’ There’s mobilization of spirit for you!”
Nevertheless, when the dressings were over I breathed relief. Never did
I learn to control my nerves completely; to listen without a tremor to
the cries of pain, the high, piercing screams, “_Oh, là, là!_” “_Ah,
Nom de Dieu!_” “_Ah, doucement, docteur!_ Easy there!” “_Oh, bon Dieu_,
how I suffer!” The quality of pure agony in those broken cries was too
much for me.
It was on trying occasions like these that Justin, the old French
orderly, came to my aid, showing me exactly how to hold a broken leg;
how to wind a difficult bandage with comfort and security; how to lift
a heavy patient without injury to myself or to him.
Justin deserves a separate paragraph all to himself, a separate little
niche in heaven. Kipling’s celebrated Gunga Din had nothing on him--for
Gunga Din had no sense, only goodness; while Justin is a Frenchman,
with all a Frenchman’s natural intelligence and sardonic humor. He
had been an orderly in a French military hospital for twenty years;
and what he did not know about sick humanity--their weakness and
irritability, their heroisms and long, long patience--was not worth
knowing. From morning to night he went trotting noiselessly about the
ward in his old blue list slippers; dirty aproned; squat, ugly and
strong as a gorilla; vulgar, gay, resolute and as tender-fingered as a
woman. And the men leaned on him as on an elder brother.
All day long it was: “Justin, a basin--quick!” “Justin, lift me up!”
“Justin, this plaster cast is killing me!” “Ah, Justin, how I suffer!”
And Justin’s steady, cheerful voice would reply: “I come, _mon
enfant_.” “There, _mon petit_!” “That goes better, _mon petit brave,
eh_?”
Once only did I see him in a passion. Some negligent person had bound a
damp bandage too tightly about a fractured leg; drying, it contracted
still further; the result was acute torture. The soldier, a modest, shy
lad, had appealed once or twice to a passing nurse; but the first big
morning rush of dressings was on and no one heeded him. Minutes passed.
The pain increased. Silently he began to weep. It was old Justin
trotting past with a pail of soiled dressings who first noted the
writhing young figure and caught a faint groan. He paused long enough
to inquire: “What’s the matter, _petit_?”
The soldier indicated his leg. The orderly’s face darkened as he
looked. He set down the pail, undid the bandage and rewound it
properly, muttering angrily between his teeth the while. Presently a
nurse bore down upon them. She was the one whom the men had nicknamed
the old _mitrailleuse_--for reasons obvious. Competent enough
technically, she had neither tenderness nor humanity nor gay spirits
to commend her services to the men. She was like a soured, fibrous old
schoolmistress, and the soldiers detested her cordially and, after the
fashion of mischievous school-children, amused themselves by devising
fresh nicknames for her each day.
Frenchmen love charm in a woman, and hate the reverse like a deformity.
Accordingly, when she paused belligerently at the bedside, both Justin
and the lad instinctively stiffened themselves.
“What are you doing, Justin?” she cried sharply. “Let that bandage
alone!”
For an orderly to dare to rewrap a certificated nurse’s bandage is,
of course, a breach of etiquette. It is a situation that requires
tact; but Justin at that moment was far too angry for tact. Stolidly
he continued his task. When the last safety pin was refastened he
straightened himself and faced the nurse squarely.
“Some imbecile, some _cochon_ of an _infirmière_,” he began, mentioning
no names, “put a wet bandage on the leg of that poor child!” And then
he continued suavely, in French--of which the nurse understood nothing
beyond a few scattering words: “Ancient female camel! Daughter of the
union of a cannon ball and a hippopotamus: Do you conceive that I, a
Frenchman and a soldier, shall not do what is good for these, my little
children? _Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_” And with a shrug of contempt he
gathered up his slops and trotted away.
It was not long after this late one afternoon, when Justin beckoned me
with a stealthy finger. By this time we had become firm allies. At noon
I saved him a cup of wine from the men’s lunch and let him rest his
aching feet and smoke a cigarette undisturbed behind a screen. And in
return Justin taught me all the fine subtleties of his art.
“You are very amiable, mees,” he began now in a carefully lowered
voice. “Will you help me?”
“What is it?” I asked; for by his conspirator air and his secrecy I
knew he intended to achieve something, by his own initiative, which
was against the rules.
“It’s Simondon, out on the _terrasse_,” he murmured, still in guarded
tones. “His new cast hurts him. Last night he did not sleep for pain,
and to-day the _pauvre petit_ has a temperature of thirty-nine. I’m
going to take off that plaster and rewad it!”
“But why don’t you ask the nurse? It’s her job, really. You and I have
no right to touch that cast without permission.”
“Simondon won’t let her come near. He’s crazy with the pain. They’ve
decided to wait for the doctor. But the doctor is up in the operating
room, and the Sacred Virgin alone knows when he will return.” He led
the way to the terrace, a sleeping porch which gave on the garden.
I knew this Simondon. He had lost an eye and had a badly infected leg,
due to four days and four nights spent on the field of battle, without
food or water, before help came. As a consequence, of the five months
spent in the hospital each separate hour had been a desperately fought
struggle, a superb resistance of the spirit.
Small wonder that, after all these long months, the cool nerve that
rarely deserts a Frenchman had worn down to rather a fine thread!
Upon the terrace we found him, a dark, painfully emaciated lad of
twenty-one, his black hair already plentifully sprinkled with white
from the hardships he had undergone. His cheeks were scarlet with
fever, and in his torture he had bitten his lips until they were
covered with a thin, bloody froth.
“No, no! You shan’t touch it!” he began fiercely as we came up.
“_Courage, mon petit brave!_” soothed Justin. “Ten minutes, and
it’ll all be over and we’ll have you up in the wheel chair. Say, old
_embusqué_! Will you have a small glass of cognac first?”
“Don’t you touch it!” breathed Simondon passionately between his teeth.
“Get out of here!”
“Hold up his leg, mees!” commanded Justin calmly. “Thus!”
Obediently I held the leg, incased from thigh to heel in an open
plaster cast, at the desired angle. Simondon let out a piercing yell.
“_Oh, bon Dieu! Oh, là, là! Wait!_” Tears of agony streamed down his
wasted cheeks. Wildly he tried to seize my hands. “Can’t you hear me?”
he sobbed. “Imbeciles! Stop!”
“Maybe we’d better,” I murmured.
But, with swift and sure precision, Justin had already begun to strip
the bandages.
“Higher!” he ordered briefly.
Again Simondon made a furious swing at my wrists. Again he screamed
madly.
“Let’s wait for the doctor,” I urged.
Justin never looked up.
“Don’t heed him, mees,” he said simply. “’Tis only his sickness
speaking.” Wise old Justin! “Rest tranquil, _petit_,” he added; and he
nodded to the young sufferer, who, suddenly docile beneath the firm,
ministering hands, returned him a quivering smile of obedience. “It’s
almost finished,” murmured Justin.
And indeed, in less time than it takes to tell, the cruelly binding
plaster incasement was shed, extra layers of soft padding inserted, the
cast readjusted and rebound; and Simondon, the tears still wet on his
cheeks, was smiling happily and sipping a tiny glass of cognac. A half
hour later, his fever abated and his red tasseled cap cocked rakishly
over his one good eye, he was up in the wheel chair--for the first time
in five months--and Justin was trundling him off for a brief promenade.
By the sheer authority of his spirit, the squat, grotesque, vulgar
little old man had achieved in a few minutes what two nurses had
labored vainly over for an hour. Shortly after he was on his rounds
again, at his perpetual dog-trot, carrying a basin and making, as he
passed me, his invariable joke--that he was taking a small gift to the
Kaiser!
The first month in the big ward I was worked to death. But so was
everybody else. Some of the nurses were ill, some of the auxiliaries
were away, and an offensive was at its height. Consequently the rest of
us worked under a terrific pressure. Ward Eighty-three, at that time
the heaviest in the hospital, had over fifty beds, each one filled
with a _grand blessé_. Fifty backs to wash; fifty beds to make; fifty
dressings to cut down, change and rebandage; fifty bedside tables to
scrub; fifty meals to serve on individual tables; fifty temperatures
and pulses to take--to say nothing of a thousand and one odd jobs, such
as hot compresses every hour, hot drinks, medicines, diets, wounds to
irrigate, beds to disinfect, which kept nurses and aids racing dizzily
straight through the day. And even then we were always behind our
schedule! The work was never done.
If anyone is suffering from a broken heart or a general stagnation of
life--what O. Henry called “slow pulse”--a big hospital ward during
the rush of an offensive is a good place to lose it. But there are
compensations; for a sick warrior is nothing after all but a sick
child, docile, naïve, craving for sympathy. He wants to be consoled for
his suffering; he wants to be cured. He demands everything and gives
everything. And at night as I passed, dog tired, down the ward, heads
were raised, hands outstretched; and the shower of cries of “_Bonsoir_,
Mees!”--“_à demain_, Mees Californie!”--were sweeter than bouquets of
roses thrown across the footlights to a reigning star.
There were twelve soldiers for whose welfare I was specifically
responsible, and who had the right to call me to their bedsides and
demand whatsoever they pleased, from an extra piece of cotton batting
over their toes to the reasons why there are so many divorces in my
country. Of these twelve, nine were under twenty-three and two looked
not a day over sixteen, rosy cheeked and downy. After the first mists
of strangeness had cleared away, and I began to view things more
normally, that was the first thing that struck me--the amazing youth of
the men. Despite their wounds and the stress of trench life in a brutal
wintry climate, they fairly shouted life and vivid vitality. Their eyes
were as clear as those of children, their laughter as fresh, their joy
as spontaneous.
One morning I was washing the back of a young Breton lad whose torso,
with its clean, flowing lines, would have delighted a sculptor.
“Claude,” I laughed, “you have a back almost as nice as Apollo’s.”
“Yes, mees? Truly?” he cried, blushing and deeply pleased.
I was puzzled by his delight, for Claude was a young coal miner who
could not even sign his own name, and I knew he did not know Apollo
from Moses. The next morning, as I was rubbing him down with alcohol,
he twisted about to ask shyly:
“Mees Californie, is my back still as nice as Apollo’s?”
As I stared at him blankly he repeated the query in slightly different
form; and then the truth dawned upon me: he thought Apollo was some
other boy in the ward whose back didn’t have any bedsores!
It would be a great mistake to conclude that the ward of a military
hospital, simply because it is the container of so much concentrated
pain, is, therefore, the natural abode of sadness and gloom. In the
first place, the soldiers, taken as a whole, are not sick: they are
only wounded--a vast difference. Save for their injuries, the majority
of them are practically well men. In the second place, they are young,
and, speaking again, in the large, magnificently healthy.
Consequently the large airy ward, with its community of bedfast
inhabitants, resembles a menagerie of fifty playful cubs--each chained
to his own post, to be sure, but capable, nevertheless, of considerable
mischief--rather than the classic conception of a sick room, with
lowered lights and voices.
Pain there is, certainly, up to the limits of human endurance; but this
is borne with a spirit, an ironic fortitude, which is a Frenchman’s
most natural possession. A soldier suffering the refined tortures of
hell during the dressing of an infected wound is yet capable of making
a jest with twitching lips that will send his comrades off into spasms
of laughter.
Nor is this humor an affectation. It is his instinctive reaction to
pain. And, as a reverse side of the same shield, he is also capable at
such times of the finest flower of courtesy, such as saying simply,
“Thank you, doctor!” to the man who has just cut off his leg without
ether.
But if he can and does endure intense pain superbly, it is no sign,
as the schoolboys say, that he intends to endure lesser, or what he
considers unnecessary ones, with like dignity. As a matter of fact, a
pain in the great toe, a crease in the drawsheet, or, above all, that
thing most dreaded by every Frenchman, a _courant d’air_ from an open
window, will produce loud lamentation, which will set the entire ward
in an uproar. For these are the small ills that can be righted, and
therefore must be--and instantaneously, if you please.
An incident in point took place recently in the ward. The chief
surgeon, when making his morning rounds, decided that a superficial
incision of perhaps an inch should be made in a certain wound in order
to permit the free passage of the Carrel-Dakin solution, the famous
antiseptic irrigation which keeps down bacterial poisoning. It was
not considered sufficiently important to remove the patient to the
operating room, or even to administer ether. Three or four snips by
the ward doctor and the thing would be done. But Georges, the party of
the first part in the operation, had decided he wanted an anæsthetic.
He did not intend to be hurt. He had understood that in this grand
hospital _de luxe_ the Americans had the latest methods; that they did
not chop a poor soldier up without first “putting him to sleep.” Vain
were my efforts to soothe him.
The other men, delighted by this fantastic grievance--for most of them
detest the anæsthetizing process--egged him on with a gayety that soon
became riotous. They exchanged bets on the possible chances of recovery
from such a grave operation. They promised to write to his mother and
to his fiancée in the event of his death. One soldier, an erstwhile
opera singer, consented to chant his mass. Another offered to confess
him, and adjured him to make a clean breast of all his sins. At lunch,
with their wine, they drank to him a solemn _morituri te salutamus_!
The day became a Fête of Death dedicated to Georges and his inch-long
cut. And when at length the crucial hour arrived, and the doctor and
nurse entered with a tray of glittering instruments, every man of them
was up on his elbow in bed, and the opera singer began softly to chant
the mass. But Georges was nowise abashed by all this jest and _blague_.
As the doctor approached his bedside he began to writhe, and gasped:
“_Mon Dieu_, how I suffer! Oh! Ah! _Doucement!_--Gently!”
“_Un!_” murmured the opera singer at his side.
The nurse pulled down the covers and elicited another loud groan.
“_Oh, là, là! Doucement! Doucement!_”
“_Deux! Trois!_” counted his neighbor.
The ward meantime was one gurgle of suppressed laughter. The nurse
started to undo the bandage.
“_Doucement!_” sang out Georges lustily.
“_Quatre!_”
The doctor picked up an instrument from the tray and touched the
wound-opening tentatively.
“_Oh, Nom de Dieu! Oh, docteur! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement!_”
“_Cinq! Six! Sept!_”
“What’s biting you, old man?” laughed the doctor in English. “You know
this doesn’t hurt.”
“_Doucement!_” roared Georges in reply.
“_Huit!_”
“I don’t understand this,” said the nurse, glancing at the chart. “He
has no temperature.”
“_Doucement! Doucement!_” moaned Georges.
“_Neuf! Dix!_” registered the opera singer.
The doctor snipped off an infinitesimal flake of dead cuticle.
“_Oh, bon Dieu! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Oh, cher
docteur! Doucement!_”
“_Onze! Douze! Treize! Quatorze! Quinze!_”
By this time the men were in a broad ripple of laughter--all save
Georges, who continued to howl with every move the doctor made. But
finally the operation was over. Doctor and nurse disappeared.
“How many?” I inquired.
“Twenty-eight!” grinned the opera singer.
Georges had screeched _Doucement!_ eight-and-twenty times inside of
five minutes, at a practically painless operation! And now the opera
singer began to mock him by singing _Doucement!_ in every conceivable
accent up and down the scale.
“Son of generations of monkeys!” grunted Georges contemptuously. He
turned to me: “A drop of cognac, mees! Regard how my hand trembles.”
And he lifted that member and waggled it before my eyes without the
faintest glimmer of a smile. Needless to say, he got his cognac; he had
earned it. The men had expected amusement and Georges had done his best
not to disappoint them. Such a mirth provoker in a ward is worth any
amount of drugs. Moreover, it is only justice to Georges to add that,
in a subsequent operation, he had his leg taken off above the knee with
a coolness, a gay devil-may-caredom that touched even his pain-hardened
comrades. Upon that occasion never a single _Doucement_ fell from his
lips. He was far more concerned over the noon meal he was forced to
miss, and cursed like a pirate because he must lose both his lunch and
his leg at the same fell clip!
But even Georges, with all his impudence and nerve, had his black
moments, his fits of melancholy, of piercing nostalgia, of deadly ennui
of the soul. _Cafard_ the soldiers call these seasons of gloom. “Blue
devils” is our equivalent term. While the Russian muzhik says simply:
“My soul suffers!”
The men dread this _cafard_ more than an operation. To fight off its
approach they reread old letters, finger over beloved relics in their
small sacks of personal belongings, smoke miles of cigarettes, read
endless romances, or write up their simple histories--poor, meager,
ill-spelled and laboriously penciled narratives of the individual rôles
they played in the present mighty conflict.
But sooner or later the _cafard_, lying in wait, gets them. That
Georges, however, witty, jeering, pungent as Javelle water, should fall
a victim filled me with surprise. But one morning I came upon him with
his head smothered under a pillow. And when I lifted it off, fancying
him asleep, his young face startled me with its look of utter and naked
misery, which he was too proud to show his little world.
“Why, what is the matter?” I cried.
He looked at me silently with brooding, gloom-filled eyes.
“I have the _cafard_,” he said simply at last.
Despite himself, his mouth quivered. Every one of those arid and
sterile hours of his sickness had piled its heavy weight upon his soul.
“Ah, when will it all be finished?” he breathed. “When shall I see my
mother, my little sister, again?”
For this I had no reply. Georges’ chances of recovery at that time were
about fifty-fifty.
“Do you see that verse?” He pointed to the high clock tower of the
hospital, which bore, in old French script, the following couplet:
_Every hour wounds;
The last one kills._
Georges repeated it slowly, with intense bitterness.
“The other day I counted how many hours I had lain couched here. Three
thousand three hundred and twenty hours!” He held up to the light a
yellow, emaciated hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? Every hour wounds, and the
last one kills, eh? Well, I’ll take my killing all at once, thanks. I’m
tired, you know. I’ll dispatch myself some day!”
A tender word on my part at that instant and Georges would have wept
outright--and never forgiven me for disgracing him! I tried a joke--his
own favorite weapon.
“Well,” I said, smiling, “if you want to die right away, this very
minute, here’s a method.”