Cannon Fodder
At the head of each iron bed hung the nurse's chart and a few words of
"history." These histories had been taken down as the wounded came in,
after their muddy uniforms had been removed, they had been bathed, and
could sink, at last, into the blessed peace and cleanness of the
hospital bed. And through them, as through the large end of a
telescope, one looked across the hot summer and the Hungarian fields,
now dusty and yellow, to the winter fighting and freezing in the
Carpathians.
"Possibly," the doctor said, "you would like to see one of these cases."
The young fellow was scarce twenty, a strapping boy with fine teeth and
intelligent eyes. He looked quite well; you could imagine him pitching
hay or dancing the czardas, with his hands on his girl's waist and her
hands on his, as these Hungarian peasants dance, round and round, for
hours together. But he would not dance again, as both his feet had been
amputated at the ankle and it was from the stumps that the doctor was
unwrapping the bandages. The history read: While doing sentry duty on
the mountains on March 28, we were left twenty-four hours without being
relieved and during that time my feet were frozen.
The doctor spoke with professional briskness. He himself would not have
tried to save any of the foot--better amputate at once at the line of
demarcation, get a good flap of healthy tissue and make a proper stump.
"That scar tissue'll never heal--it'll always be tender and break when
he tries to use it; he has been here four months now, and you can see
how tender it is."
The boy scowled and grinned as the doctor touched the scar. For our
English and those things under the sheet he seemed to have much the same
feeling of strangeness: both were something foreign, rather
uncomfortable. He looked relieved when the bandages were on again and
the white sheet drawn up. "We had dozens of them during the winter--one
hundred and sixty-three frozen feet and one hundred frozen hands in this
hospital alone. They had to be driven back from the front in carts, for
days sometimes. When they got here their feet were black--literally
rotting away. Nothing to do but let the flesh slough off and then
amputate."
We strolled on down the sunny, clean-smelling wards. The windows were
open. They were playing tennis in the yard below; on a bench under a
tree a young Hungarian soldier, one arm in a sling, and a girl were
reading the same book. Sunday is a very genial day in Budapest. The
café tables are crowded, orchestras playing everywhere, and in dozens of
pavilions and on the grass and gravel outside them peasants and the
humbler sort of people are dancing. The Danube--beautiful if not blue
--flows through the town.
Pest is on one bank and Buda on the other, beside a wooded hill climbing
steeply up to the old citadel, somewhat as the west bank of the Hudson
climbs up to Storm King.
I first came on the Danube at Budapest in the evening after dinner and
saw, close in front of me, what looked to be some curious electric-light
sign. It seemed odd in war time, and I stared for a moment before I saw
that this strange design was really the black, opposite bank with its
zigzag streams of lamps.
Few cities have so naturally beautiful a drop-curtain, and, instead of
spoiling it with gas-works' and grain-elevators as we should do, the
Hungarians have been thoughtful enough to build a tree-covered promenade
between the Danube and the string of hotels which line the river. In
front of each of these hotels is a double row of tables and a hedge, and
then the trees, under which, while the orchestras play, all Pest comes
to stroll and take the air between coffee-time and the late Hungarian
dinner.
Hundreds of cities have some such promenade, but few so genial and cosey
a one as that of Budapest--not the brittle gayety of some more
sophisticated capitals, but the simpler light-heartedness of a people
full of feeling, fond of music and talk, and ready to share all they
have with a stranger.
The bands play tunes from our musical comedies, but every now and then
--and this is what the people like best--they swing into the strange,
rolling, passionate-melancholy music of the country. Wherever the
tzigany music comes from, it seems Hungarian, at any rate--fiery and
indolent and haphazard, rolling on without any particular rhyme or
reason, now piling up and now sinking indolently back as the waves roll
up and fall back on the sand. People will listen to it for hours, and
you can imagine one of those simpler daredevils--a hussar, for instance
--in his blue-braided jacket, red breeches, and big cavalry boots,
listening and drinking, and thinking of the fights he has won and the
girls he has lost, getting sorry for himself at last and breaking his
glass and weeping, and being very happy indeed.
There is a club in Budapest--at once a club and a luxurious villa almost
too crowded with rugs and fine furniture. When you go to play tennis,
instead of the ordinary locker-room one is ushered into a sort of
boudoir filled with Chippendale furniture. It is a delightful place to
get exercise, with tea served on a garden table between sets; yet, when
I was in Budapest, the place was almost deserted. It was not, it
seemed, the season that people came there, although just the season to
use such a place. For six weeks they came here, and nothing could bring
them back again. They did things only in spurts, so to speak: "They go
off on hunting trips to the ends of the earth, bring back animals for
the Zoo, then off to their country places and--flop! Then there is a
racing season, and they play polo and race for a while, then--flop!"
I have never seen such interesting photographers' show-windows as there
are in Budapest. Partly this is because the photographers are good, but
partly it must he in the Hungarians themselves--such vivid, interesting,
unconventional faces. These people look as if they ought to do the
acting and write the music and novels and plays and paint the pictures
for all the rest of the world. If they haven't done so, it must be
because, along with their natural talent, they have this indolence and
tendency to flop and not push things through.
It was this Budapest, so easy-going and cheerful, that came drifting
through the hospital windows, with the faint sound of band music that
Sunday afternoon.
On all the park benches and the paths winding up to the citadel, in a
hundred shady corners and walks, soldiers, with canes and bandages, were
sitting with their best girls, laughing with them, holding hands. The
boys, with miniature flower-gardens in their hats, tinselled grass and
red-white-and-green rosettes, could sit with their arms round their
sweethearts as much as they wanted to, for everybody knew that they had
just been called to the colors and this was their farewell.
I looked over more of the histories--not in the ward, where one was, of
course, more or less a nuisance, but in the room where they were filed
in hundred lots. Some of the men were still in the hospital, some had
died, most of them gone back to the front. There were many of these
foot cases: "While on outpost duty in the Carpathians during a
snow-storm I felt the lower part of my body becoming powerless. Not
being able to walk, was carried back and put on train. Next day we were
stopped, because Russians were ahead of us, and obliged to leave train.
Waited two days without food or medical attention; then put on train for
Budapest."
"My regiment was in the Carpathians, and on or about January 20 my feet
refused to obey. I held out for four days and then reported ill. Toes
amputated, right foot."
"I belong to German Grenadier Regiment No. ----. On February 6, while
sleeping in open snow, I felt numbed in feet. Put on light duty, but on
8th reported ill and doctor declared feet frozen."
"March 12, during heavy snowstorm, Russians attacked us. One of my
comrades was shot in stomach, and I took off my gloves to bandage him.
All at once our regiment sounded 'Storm!' and I had to rush off to
attack, forgetting my gloves. I had both my hands frozen."
"I am field-cornet of the---German Grenadiers. I was, since the
beginning of the war, in Belgium and France, and at end of November sent
to Russian Poland and January 1 to Carpathians. On February 6, while
retiring to prevent the Russians surrounding us, I was shot In thigh at
1,500 yards distance and fell. Within a few minutes I got two more
shots."
"That's just like a German," commented the nurse. "They always begin by
telling just who they are and what they were doing. A Hungarian would
probably just say that he was up in the mountains and it was cold. These
soldiers are like big children, some of them, and they tell us things
sometimes."
"While in Carpathians on January 20 I reported to my lieutenant, feet
frozen. He said dig a hole and when you are quite frozen we will put
you in. I stood it another seven days, then we had to retreat. I went
myself to the doctor; my feet were then black already. Debreczen
hospital six days, then here. Both amputated."
The feet were gone, at any rate, whatever the lieutenant may have said.
We returned to the German field-cornet.
"He came in walking--a fine, tall man. We had only one place to bathe
the men in, then: a big tank--for everything was improvised and there
was no hot-water heater--and one of the doctors told him he could use
his own bath up-stairs, but he said no, he'd stay with his men. He
seemed to be getting on all right, then one morning the doctor touched
his leg and he heard that crackling sound--it was gas infection. They
just slit his leg down from hip to knee, but it was no use--he died in
three hours. Practically all the wounds were infected when the men came
in, but suppose he could have picked up something in that bath? He came
in walking."
Through most of the German histories one could see the German armies
turning now this way, now that, against their "world of enemies," as
they say: "I belong to---Regiment German Infantry and am stationed since
March 1 in Carpathians. I am in active service since the start, having
done Belgium, France, and Russia."
"While at battle of Luneville, with troop of about forty men stormed
battery, capturing them, for which decorated with Iron Cross. Shifted
to Carpathians. After march in severe cold, fingers and feet frozen."
"While in France attacking I was hit in head by shrapnel. In hospital
fourteen days, then sent to Carpathians on December 7 with
Austro-Hungarian troops. Wounded in arm and while creeping back hit
five times in fifteen minutes. Lay all afternoon in trenches."
"I think those are the three who came in together one night, all singing
'Die Wacht am Rhein'; they all had the Iron Cross. They were a noisy
lot. They all got well and went back to the front again."
Here were three pictures from the Galician fighting: "Wounded by
shrapnel near Przemysl, bandaged by comrade, and helped to house; only
occupant old woman. Lay on straw two days, no food. Called to men
passing; they had me moved in cart seventy miles to hospital. Stayed
eight days; started on train, then taken off for three days, then to
Budapest."
"During fighting at Lupkow Pass I was wounded by two pistol-shots.
First one, fired by Russian officer, hit me in chest. Ran back to my
company and in darkness taken by one of our officers for Russian and
shot in arm."
"While digging trenches struck by a rifle-bullet in two places. Lay in
trench two hours when found by Russian infantrymen, who hurriedly
dressed me and put me out of firing-range on horse blanket in old
trench. Later found by our soldiers, carried to base, and dressed
there, then to field-hospital, then in cart to railroad station. Went
few kilometres by train, but became so ill had to be taken off for two
days, then sent to Budapest. Seventeen days. Two months in hospital;
returned to front."
"We called that man 'professor,'" said the nurse. "He was a teacher of
some sort. There was a boy here at the same time, a Pole, but he could
speak English: just out of the university--Cracow, I think. He was in
Serbia, and was shot through the temple; he lost the sight of both
eyes."
Several in the Serbian fighting had struck river mines. One, who had
been ordered to proceed across the River Save near Sabac, remarked that
he was "told afterward" they had struck a floating mine and that seven
were killed and thirteen wounded. The Serbian campaign was not
pleasant. The Serbians do not hold up their hands, as the big,
childlike Russians sometimes seem to have done. They fight as long as
they can stand. Then there was disease and lack of medical supplies and
service. '"They came in covered with mud and with fractures done up with
twigs--just as they had been dressed on the field. Sometimes a
fractured hip would be bound with a good-sized limb from a tree reaching
all the way from the man's feet to his waist."
Yet the wonder is what nature and the tough constitutions of these young
men will do with intelligent help. We came to what they call a "face
case." "Wounded November 4 in Galicia by rifle-fire on right side of
face and right hand; dressed by comrade, then lost consciousness until
arrived here. ('He probably means,' explained the nurse, 'that he was
delirious and didn't realize the time.') Physical examination--right
side of face blown away; lower jaw broken into several pieces, extending
to left side; teeth on lower jaw loose; part of upper jaw gone, and
tongue exposed. Infected. Operated--several pieces of lower jaw
removed and two pieces wired together in front."
From the desk drawer the nurse picked out several photographs--X-ray
pictures of little round shrapnel bullets embedded in flesh, of bone
splintered by rifle-bullets and shot through the surrounding flesh as if
they had been exploded; one or two black feet cut off above the ankles;
one of a group of convalescents standing on the hospital steps.
"There he is," she said, pointing-to a man with a slightly crooked jaw--
the man whose history we had just read. "We saved it. It isn't such a
bad face, after all."
The worst wounds, of course, do not come to a hospital so far from the
front as this--they never leave the battle-field at all. In Turkey, for
instance, where travelling is difficult, very few of those shot through
the trunk of the body ever got as far as Constantinople--nearly all of
the patients were wounded in the head, arms, or legs. On over a
thousand patients in this Budapest hospital the following statistics are
based: Rifle wounds, 1,095; shrapnel, 138; shell, 2; bayonet, 2; sabre,
1; hand-grenade, 1; frozen feet, 163; frozen hands, 100; rheumatism, 65;
typhoid, 38; pneumonia, 15; tetanus, 5; gas infection, 5. Deaths, 19--
septicemia, 7; pneumonia, tetanus, typhoid, 1. It was dark when I
started down-stairs, through that warm, brooding stillness of a hospital
at night. The ward at the head of the stairs was hushed now, and the
hall lamp, shining across the white trousers of an orderly dozing in his
chair within the shadow of the door and past the screen drawn in front
of it, dimly lit the foot of the line of beds where the men lay
sleeping.
Nothing could happen to them now--until they were sound again and the
order came to go out and fling themselves again under the wheels. The
doctor on duty for the night, coat off, was stretched on his sofa
peacefully reading under a green lamp. And, as I went down-stairs past
the three long wards, the only sign of life was in a little circle of
light cast by a single lamp over the bed of one of the new patients,
lighting up the upturned profile of a man and the fair hair of the young
night nurse bending over him and silently changing the cloths on his
chest.
We dined late that evening on an open balcony at the top of the house.
People in Vienna and Budapest like to eat and drink in the open air.
Below us lay the dark velvet of the park, with an occasional lamp, and
beyond, over the roofs of Pest, the lights of Buda across the river.
Up through the trees came the voices of men singing. I asked what this
might be. They were men, my friends explained, who had had their legs
amputated. There were fifty-eight of them, and the people who owned the
big, empty garden across the street had set it aside for them to live
in. There they could sit in the sun and learn to walk on their
artificial legs--it was a sort of school for them.
I went to see it next morning--this Garden of Legless Men. They were
scattered about under the trees on benches two by two, some with
bandaged stumps, some with crutches, some with no legs at all. They
hobbled over willingly enough to have their pictures taken, although one
of them muttered that he had had his taken seventy times and no one had
sent him a. copy yet. The matron gathered them about her, arranging
them rather proudly so that their wounds "would show. One looked to be
quite all right--because he had artificial legs, boots and all, below
the knee.
"Come," said the matron, "show the gentleman how you can walk." And the
obedient man came wabbling toward us in a curious, slightly rickety
progress, like one of those toys which are wound up and set going on the
sidewalk. At the matron's suggestion he even dropped one of his canes.
He could almost stand alone, indeed, like some of the political
arguments for which millions of healthy young fellows like him
obediently go out to fight.
The Augusta Barracken Hospital is on the outskirts of Budapest--a
characteristic product of the war, wholesale healing for wholesale
maiming--1,000 beds and all the essentials, in what, two months before,
was a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. The buildings are long,
one-story, pine barracks, just wide enough for two rows of beds with an
aisle down the centre. The space between the barracks is filled, in
thrifty European fashion, with vegetable-gardens, and they are set on
neat streets through which the patients can be wheeled or carried to and
from the operating and dressing rooms without going up or down stairs.
Trains come in from the observation hospitals near the front, where all
wounded now stay for five days until it is certain they have no
contagious disease, and switch right up to the door of the
receiving-room.
The men give their names, pass at once to another room where their
uniforms are taken away to be disinfected, thence to the bathroom, then
into clean clothes and to bed. It is a city of the sick--of healing,
rather--and on a bright day, with crowds of convalescents sitting about
in their linen pajamas in the sun, stretcher-bearers going back and
forth, the capable-looking surgeons with their strong, kind faces,
pretty nurses in nun-like white, it all has the brisk, rather jolly air
of any vigorous organism, going full blast ahead.
We had been through it, seen the wards of strapping, handsome, childlike
Russians, as carefully looked after by the Hungarians as if they were
their own, when our officer guide remarked that in an hour or two a
transport of four hundred new wounded would be coming in. We waited in
the receiving-room, where a young convalescent had been brought out on a
stretcher to see his peasant family--a weather-beaten father, a mother
with a kerchief over her head, two solemn, little, round-faced brothers
with Tyrolean feathers in their caps. Benches were arranged for those
able to sit up, clerks prepared three writing-desks, orderlies laid a
row of stretchers side by side for fifty yards or so along the railroad
track.
The transport was late, the sun going, and I went down to the other end
of the yard to get a picture of some Russians I had seen two days
before. We had walked through their ward then, and I remembered one very
sick boy, to whom one of the nurses with us had given a flower she was
wearing, and how he had smiled as he put it to his face with his gaunt,
white hand. "It doesn't take long," she had said, "when they get like
that. They have so little vitality to go on, and some morning between
two and five"--and sure enough his bed was empty now.
A troop-train was rushing by, as I came back, covered with green
branches and flowers. They went by with a cheer--that cheer which
sounds like a cheer sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on
adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of faces, like the
windy shriek of lost souls.
Then came a sound of band music, and down the road, outside the high
wire fence, a little procession led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing
Chopin's "Funeral March." Behind them came the hospital hearse, priests,
and a weeping peasant family. The little procession moved slowly behind
the wailing trumpets--it was an honor given to all who died here, except
the enemy--and must have seemed almost a sort of extravagance to the
convalescents crowding up to the fence who had seen scores of their
comrades buried in a common trench. Opposite us the drums rolled and
the band began the Austrian national hymn. Then they stopped; the
soldier escort fired their rules in the air. That ended the ceremony,
and the hearse moved on alone.
Then the convalescents drifted back toward us. Most of them would soon
be ready for the front again, and many glad of it, if only to be men in
a man's world again. One of the nurses spoke of some of the others she
had known. One man slashed his hand with his knife in the hope of
staying behind. Even the bravest must gather themselves together before
the leap. Only those who have seen what modern guns can do know how much
to fear them.
"For a week or so after they come in lots of them are dazed; they just
lie there scarcely stirring. All that part of it--the shock to their
nerves--we see more of than the doctors do. When the word comes to go
out again they have all the physical symptoms of intense nervous
excitement, even nausea sometimes." The train came at last--two long
sections of sleeping-cars. An officer stepped off, clicked his heels,
and saluted, and the orderlies started unloading the men. Those who
could walk at all were helped from the doors; the others--men with
broken hips, legs in casts, and so on--were passed out of the windows on
stretchers held over the orderlies' heads. In the receiving-ward they
were set down in rows before the three tables, most of them clutching
their papers as they came. Each man gave his name and regiment, and
such particulars, and the address of some one of his family to whom
notice could be sent. It was one clerk's duty to address a post-card
telling his family of his condition and that he was in the hospital.
These cards were already ruled off into columns in each of which the
words "Lightly wounded," "Wounded," "Severely wounded," "Ill," "Very
ill" were printed in nine of the languages spoken in Austria-Hungary.
The clerk merely had to put a cross on the proper word. Here, for
instance, is the Lightly wounded column, in German, Hungarian, and the
other dialects: "Leicht verwundet, Konnyen megse-besult, Lehce ranen,
Lekko raniony, Lecko ranenki, Leggiermente Jcrzto, Lako ranjen, Lahko
ranjen, Usor ranit."
A number were Russians--fine, big, clear-eyed fellows with whom these
genuine "Huns" chatted and laughed as if they were their own men. On
one stretcher came a very pale, round-faced, little boy about twelve,
with stubbly blond hair clipped short and an enchanting smile. He had
been carrying water for the soldiers, somebody said, when a piece of
shrapnel took off one of his feet. Possibly he was one of those little
adventurers who run away to war as boys used to run away to sea or the
circus. He seemed entirely at home with these men, at any rate, and
when one of the Hungarians brought him a big tin cup of coffee and a
chunk of black bread, he wriggled himself half upright and went to work
at it like a veteran.
As soon as the men were registered they were hurried out of their
uniforms and into the bathroom. At the door two nurses in white--so
calm and clean and strong that they must have seemed like goddesses, in
that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering wounds--received
them, asked each man how he was wounded, and quickly, as if he were a
child, snipped off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast,
and turned him over to the orderlies. Those who could walk used
showers, the others were bathed on inclined slabs. Even the worst
wounded scarcely made a sound, and those who could take care of
themselves limped under the showers as if they had been hospital
boarders before, and waited for, and even demanded, with a certain
peremptoriness, their little bundle of belongings before they went on to
the dressing-room.
Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy that all this
organized kindness and comfort suddenly enveloping them was enough to
raise them for the moment above thoughts of pain.
As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and loosened the
pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up thigh, a thick, sickening odor
spread through the room. As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn
from the wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into the pan.
The jagged chunk of shell had hit him at the top of the thigh and
ploughed down to the knee. The wound had become infected, and the
connecting tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely more
than a bone and the two flaps of flesh. The civilian thinks of a wound,
generally, as a comparatively decent sort of hole, more or less the
width of the bullet itself. There was nothing decent about this wound.
It was such a slash as one might expect in a slaughtered ox. It had
been slit farther to clean the infection, until you could have thrust
your fist into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly from
weakness, partly from the man's nervousness, trembled like a leaf.
First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be pulled out. The man,
of an age that suggested that he might have left at home a peasant wife,
slightly faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug his nails
into the under side of the table, but made no outcry. The surgeon
squeezed the flesh above and about the wound, the quick-fingered young
nurse flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, dry gauze
was pushed into it and slowly pulled out again.
The man--they had nicknamed him "Pop"--breathed faster. This panting
went into a moan, which deepened into a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost
hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of sharp yelping
like a dog.
This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; not rarely and in one
hospital, but in all hospitals and every morning, when the long line of
men--'"pus tanks' we called 'em last winter," muttered one of the young
doctors--are brought in to be dressed, There was such a leg that day in
the Barracken Hospital; the case described here was in the American Red
Cross Hospital in Vienna.
Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, of course. It is a
part of war. Yet the more one sees of it and of this cannon fodder, the
people on whom the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are in
their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffering, whether
Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or Turks, the less simple is it to be
convinced of the complete righteousness of any of the various general
ideas in whose name these men are tortured. I suspect that only those
can hate with entire satisfaction and success who stay quietly at home
and read the papers.
I remember riding down into Surrey from London one Sunday last August
and reading an editorial on Louvain--so well written, so quivering with
noble indignation that one's blood boiled, as they say, and one could
scarcely wait to get off the train to begin the work of revenge.
Perhaps the most moving passage in this editorial was about the smoking
ruins of the Town Hall, which I later saw intact. I have thought
occasionally since of that editorial and of the thousands of sedentary
fire-eaters and hate-mongers like the writer of it--men who live forever
in a cloud of words, bounce from one nervous reaction to another without
ever touching the ground, and, rejoicing in their eloquence, go down
from their comfortable breakfasts to their comfortable offices morning
after morning and demand slaughter, annihilation, heaven knows what not
--men who could not endure for ten minutes that small part of war which
any frail girl of a trained nurse endures hour after hour every morning
as part of the day's work.
If I had stayed in London and continued to read the lies of but one
side, I should doubtless, by this time, be able to loathe and despise
the enemy with an entire lack of doubt, discomfort, or intelligence.
But having been in all the countries and read all the lies, the problem
is less simple.
How many people who talk or write about war would have the courage to
face a minute, fractional part of the reality underlying war's inherited
romance? People speak with pleasant excitement of "flashing sabres"
without the remotest thought of what flashing sabres do. A sabre does
not stop in mid-air with its flashing, where a Meissonier or a Detaille
would paint it--it goes right on through the cords and veins of a man's
neck. Sabre wounds are not very common, but there was one in the Vienna
hospital that morning--a V-shaped trench in which you could have laid
four fingers fiat, down through the hair and into the back of the man's
neck, so close to the big blood-vessel that you could see it beat under
its film of tissue--the only thing between him and death. I thought of
it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army
officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase:
'"Sharpen sabres!' was the joyful cry."
Be joyful if you can, when you know what war is, and, knowing it, know
also that it is the only way to do your necessary work. The absurd and
disgusting thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who can
slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, with words, and would not
be able to make so trivial a start toward the "crushing" they are
forever talking about as to fire into another man's open eyes or jam a
bayonet into a single man's stomach. Among the Utopian steps which one
would most gladly support would be an attempt to send the editors and
politicians of all belligerent countries to serve a week in the enemy's
hospitals.