Private Saunders, of the Ninth Infantry, was flushed and dazed with
fever, but able to walk from the ambulance up a stone stairway into
what looked to him like a huge and gilded warehouse. At first glance,
he did not see the long rows of cots whose gray blankets blended with
the carpet of dusk and shadow in the late winter afternoon. Monstrous
golden dragons seemed to writhe and flicker against the roof beams
far above him, or twist in play on lines of massive columns. Saunders
dropped his kit and leaned on his rifle while he rubbed his eyes with
a trembling hand. If this was the hospital of the American army in
Peking, he wished that some one would turn out the guard and capture
the menagerie that had taken possession. Sliding uncertain feet across
the flagged floor, he fell over a cot and gripped a protesting leg,
whose owner sputtered:
"Get off o' me, you left-footed lobster. Ain't there no chance for a
man to be sick without the roof fallin' on him? Why, hello, Jim, what
in blazes is the matter with you? Brace up and holler for the orderly.
He's somewhere down at the end of the line, packin' up what's left of
Chase of P Company, who just passed in his checks."
Saunders sat on the edge of the cot and wept with the whimper of a
tired child:
"Is it the hospital sure enough, Shorty? All them ten-foot dragons
makin' faces at me in the dark ain't comfortin' to a man with wheels in
his head. Guess this must be the Emp'ror's private temple. Why, here's
a dozen o' my pals spraddled around over the floor. I've hit the right
place, all right. Lead me to my bunk, an' get me bedded down."
The overworked hospital corps private, who was nurse and orderly for
the ward, picked up the accouterments of Saunders, and helped him
crawl under the blankets of the cot alongside "Shorty" Blake. The
contract surgeon, delaying to question a group of convalescents in the
courtyard, came in to examine the new patient, and said "pneumonia"
to the nurse. Saunders heard nothing of the consultation, for he was
looking up into the gloom of the distant rafters, and trying to count
the racing gilded dragons that would not be still and made his head
ache intolerably. When lanterns were lighted at the ends of each aisle,
the shadows danced worse than before, and to his fevered eyes the great
temple was populous with glittering shapes in terrifying agitation.
This, the largest of the clustered buildings in the park of the Temple
of Earth, was an extraordinary hospital, even in daylight. Sacred to
the annual pilgrimage of the Emperor in his worship of the Supreme
Deity, these temples had been inviolate for many centuries until
profaned by the conquering foreign allies. The walled park became the
camp of the American forces, and one of the most sacred shrines of the
land was used as a field hospital. A regiment could have been drilled
on the marble pavement without crowding, and the two hundred sick
soldiers scattered in the vastness of it were bitten with a sense of
chilling desolation.
Between flights of delirium, through his first night in hospital,
Saunders heard the groans and restless muttering of many men, and his
fancies magnified them into an army. There were neither screens nor
walls to divide the wards, only the rows of cots between the carved
pillars that marched across the temple floor, so that all individual
suffering and the tenacious struggle of dying became common property.
The soldiers who passed away in the night time did not trouble their
comrades so much as when death came in daylight, and the end was a
spectacle thrust upon those in surrounding cots.
A little after midnight the tramp of stretcher bearers punctuated a
thin and wailing outcry, coming from that which they bore, and the
temple floor awoke with weary curses. Those near the doorway learned
that a Chinese coolie, caught in the act of stealing coal from the
quartermaster's corral, had been tumbled off a wall by a sentry's
shot. The lamentations of the victim rasped sick nerves beyond
endurance, and the hospital held no sympathy in its smallest crevice.
The coolie was an old man and badly hurt. Opium had made him impervious
to customary doses of morphine, and after he had been drugged in
quantities to kill four men, he was no nearer rest. From a far corner
of the temple the wounded coolie wailed an unending
"Ay oh"--"Ay oh"--"Ay oh!"