gas cases was acute congestion of the lungs, the surgeons were able to
treat it upon special and definite lines. Means were devised for
insuring the expulsion of the excessive secretion from the lungs, thus
affording much relief and making it possible to avert asphyxiation. In
some apparently hopeless cases the lives of the men were saved by
artificial respiration. The inhalation of oxygen was also tried with
favorable results, and in cases where the restlessness of the patient
was more mental than physical, opium was successfully used. So that even
the poison-gas, perhaps the most dreadful death-dealing device which the
war has produced, neither dismayed nor defeated the men whose task it is
to save life instead of to take it.
To the surgeons and nurses at the front the people of France and England
owe a debt of gratitude which they can never wholly repay. The soldiers
in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic battle than these
quiet, efficient, energetic men and women who wear the red badge of
mercy. Their courage is shown by the enormous losses they have suffered
under fire, the proportion of military doctors and hospital attendants
killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, equalling the proportion of infantry
losses. They have no sleep save such as they can snatch between the
tides of wounded or when they drop on the floor from sheerest
exhaustion. They are working under as trying conditions as doctors and
nurses were ever called upon to face. They treat daily hundreds of
cases, any one of which would cause a city physician to call a
consultation. They are in constant peril from marauding _Taubes_, for
the German airmen seem to take delight in choosing buildings flying the
Red Cross flag as targets for their bombs. In their ears, both day and
night, sounds the din of near-by battle. Their organization is a marvel
of efficiency. That of the Germans may be as good but it can be no
better.
In order that I may bring home to you in America the realities of this
thing called war, I want to tell you what I saw one day in a little town
called Bailleul. Bailleul is only two or three miles on the French side
of the Franco-Belgian frontier, and it is so close to the firing-line
that its windows continually rattle. The noise along that portion of the
battle-front never ceases. It sounds for all the world like the clatter
of a gigantic harvester. And that is precisely what it is—the harvester
of death.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders.
“The soldiers in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic
battle than these quiet, efficient, energetic men who wear the red
badge of mercy.”
]
As we entered Bailleul they were bringing in the harvest. They were
bringing it in motor-cars, many, many, many of them, stretching in
endless procession down the yellow roads which lead to Lille and Neuve
Chapelle and Poperinghe and Ypres. Over the gray bodies of the
motor-cars were gray canvas hoods, and painted on the hoods were staring
scarlet crosses. The curtain at the back of each car was rolled up, and
protruding from the dim interior were four pairs of feet. Sometimes
those feet were wrapped in bandages, and on the fresh white linen were
bright-red splotches, but more often they were incased in worn and
muddied boots. I shall never forget those poor, broken, mud-incrusted
boots, for they spoke so eloquently of utter weariness and pain. There
was something about them that was the very essence of pathos. The owners
of those boots were lying on stretchers which were made to slide into
the ambulances as drawers slide into a bureau, and most of them were
suffering agony such as only a woman in childbirth knows.
[Illustration:
Bringing in the harvest of the guns.
The dripping stretchers slide into the ambulances as drawers slide
into a bureau.
]
This was the reaping of the grim harvester which was at its work of
mowing down human beings not five miles away. Sometimes, as the
ambulances went rocking by, I would catch a fleeting glimpse of some
poor fellow whose wounds would not permit of his lying down. I remember
one of these in particular—a clean-cut, fair-haired youngster who looked
to be still in his teens. He was sitting on the floor of the ambulance
leaning for support against the rail. He held his arms straight out in
front of him. Both his hands had been blown away at the wrists. The head
of another was so swathed in bandages that my first impression was that
he was wearing a huge red-and-white turban. The jolting of the car had
caused the bandages to slip. If that man lives little children will run
from him in terror, and women will turn aside when they meet him on the
street. And still that caravan of agony kept rolling by, rolling by. The
floors of the cars were sieves leaking blood. The dusty road over which
they had passed no longer needed sprinkling.
Tearing over the rough cobbles of Bailleul, the ambulances came to a
halt before some one of the many doorways over which droop the Red Cross
flags, for every suitable building in the little town has been converted
into a hospital. The one of which I am going to tell you had been a
school until the war began. It is officially known as Clearing Hospital
Number Eight, but I shall always think of it as hell’s antechamber. In
the afternoon that I was there eight hundred wounded were brought into
that building between the hours of two and four, and this, mind you, was
but one of many hospitals in the same little town. As I entered the door
I had to stand aside to let a stretcher carried by two orderlies pass
out. Through the rough brown blanket which covered the stretcher showed
the vague outlines of a human form, but the face was covered, and it was
very still. A week or two weeks or a month later, when the casualty
lists were published, there appeared the name of the still form under
the brown blanket, and there was anguish in some English home. In the
hallway of the hospital a man was sitting upright on a bench, and two
surgeons were working over him. He was sitting there because the
operating-rooms were filled. I hope that that man is unmarried, for he
no longer has a face. What a few hours before had been the honest
countenance of an English lad was now a horrid welter of blood and
splintered bone and mangled flesh.
The surgeon in charge took me upstairs to the ward which contained the
more serious cases. On a cot beside the door was stretched a young
Canadian. His face looked as though a giant in spiked shoes had stepped
upon it. “Look,” said the surgeon, and lifted the woollen blanket. That
man’s body was like a field which has been gone over with a disk harrow.
His feet, his legs, his abdomen, his chest, his arms, his face were
furrowed with gaping, angry wounds. “He was shot through the hand,”
explained the surgeon. “He made his way back to the dressing-station in
the reserve trenches, but just as he reached it a shell exploded at his
feet.” I patted him on the shoulder and told him that I too knew the
land of the great forests and the rolling prairies, and that before long
he was going back to it. And, though he could not speak, he turned that
poor, torn face of his and smiled at me. He must have been suffering the
torments of the damned, but he smiled at me, I tell you—_he smiled at
me_.
In the next bed, not two feet away—for the hospitals in Bailleul are
very crowded—a great, brawny fellow from a Highland regiment was sitting
propped against his pillows. He could not lie down, the surgeon told me,
because he had been shot through the lungs. He held a tin cup in his
hand, and quite regularly, about once a minute, he would hold it to his
lips and spit out blood. Over by the window lay a boy with a face as
white as the pillow-cover. He was quite conscious, and stared at the
ceiling with wide, unseeing eyes. “Another shrapnel case,” remarked a
hospital attendant. “Both legs amputated, but he’ll recover.” I wonder
what he will do for a living when he gets back to England. Perhaps he
will sell pencils or boot-laces on the flags of Piccadilly, and hold out
his cap for coppers. A man with his head all swathed in strips of linen
lay so motionless that I asked if he was living. “A head wound,” was the
answer. “We’ve tried trepanning, and he’ll probably pull through, but
he’ll never recover his reason.” Can’t you see him in the years to come,
this splendid specimen of manhood, his mind a blank, wandering, helpless
as a little child, about some English village?
I doubt if any four walls in all the world contain more human suffering
than those of Hospital Number Eight at Bailleul, yet of all those
shattered, broken, mangled men I heard only one utter a complaint or
groan. He was a fair-haired giant, as are so many of these English
fighting men. A bullet had splintered his spine and, with his hours
numbered, he was suffering the most awful torment that a human being can
endure. The sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. The muscles of his
neck and arms were so corded and knotted that it seemed as though they
were about to burst their way through the sun-tanned skin. His naked
breast rose and fell in great sobs of agony. “Oh God! Oh God!” he
moaned, “be merciful and take me—it hurts, it hurts—_it hurts me so_—my
wife—the kiddies—for the love of Christ, doctor, give me a hypodermic
and stop the pain—say good-by to them for me—tell them—oh, I _can’t_
stand it any longer—I’m not afraid to die, doctor, but I just can’t
stand this pain—oh God, dear God, _won’t you please let me die_?”
When I went out of that room the beads of sweat were standing on _my_
forehead.
[Illustration:
“Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded and
still they came streaming in.”
]
They took me down-stairs to show me what they call the “evacuation
ward.” It is a big, barn-like room, perhaps a hundred feet long by fifty
wide, and the floor was so thickly covered with blanketed forms on
stretchers that there was no room to walk about among them. These were
the men whose wounds had been treated, and who, it was believed, were
able to survive the journey by hospital train to one of the base
hospitals on the coast. It is a very grave case indeed that is permitted
to remain for even a single night in the hospitals in Bailleul, for
Bailleul is but a clearinghouse for the mangled, and its hospitals must
always be ready to receive that unceasing scarlet stream which, day and
night, night and day, comes pouring in, pouring in, pouring in.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
“The paths of glory lead——”
]
Those of the wounded in the evacuation ward who were conscious were for
the most part cheerful—as cheerful, that is, as men can be whose bodies
have been ripped and drilled and torn by shot and shell, who have been
strangled by poisonous gases, who are aflame with fever, who are faint
with loss of blood, and who have before them a railway journey of many
hours. This railway journey to the coast is as comfortable as human
ingenuity can make it, the trains with their white enamelled interiors
and swinging berths being literally hospitals on wheels, but to these
weakened, wearied men it is a terribly trying experience, even though
they know that at the end of it clean beds and cool pillows and
soft-footed, low-voiced nurses await them.
The men awaiting transfer still wore the clothes in which they had been
carried from the trenches, though in many cases they had been slashed
open so that the surgeons might get at the wounds. They were plastered
with mud. Many of them had had no opportunity to bathe for weeks and
were crawling with vermin. Their underclothes were in such loathsome
condition that when they were removed they fell apart. The canvas
stretchers on which they lay so patiently and uncomplainingly were
splotched with what looked like wet brown paint, and on this horrid
sticky substance were swarms of hungry flies. The air was heavy with the
mingled smells of antiseptics, perspiration, and fresh blood. In that
room was to be found every form of wound which can be inflicted by the
most hellish weapons the brain of man has been able to devise. The
wounded were covered with coarse woollen blankets, but some of the men
in their torment had kicked their coverings off, and I saw things which
I have no words to tell about and which I wish with all my heart that I
could forget. There were men whose legs had been amputated up to the
thighs; whose arms had been cut off at the shoulder; there were men who
had lost their eyesight and all their days must grope in darkness; and
there were other men who had been ripped open from waist to neck so that
they looked like the carcasses that hang in front of butcher-shops;
while most horrible of all were those who, without a wound on them,
raved and cackled with insane mirth at the horror of the things that
they had seen.
We went out from that place of unforgettable horrors into the sunlight
and the clean fresh air again. It was late afternoon, the birds were
singing, a gentle breeze was whispering in the tree-tops; but from over
there, on the other side of that green and smiling valley, still came
the unceasing clatter of that grim harvester garnering its crop of
death. On the ground, in the shade of a spreading chestnut-tree, had
been laid a stretcher, and on it was still another of those silent,
bandaged forms. “He is badly wounded,” said the surgeon, following the
direction of my glance, “fairly shot to pieces. But he begged us to
leave him in the open air. We are sending him on by train to Boulogne
to-night, and then by hospital ship to England.” I walked over and
looked down at him. He could not have been more than eighteen—just such
a clean-limbed, open-faced lad as any girl would have been proud to call
sweetheart, any mother son. He was lying very still. About his face
there was a peculiar grayish pallor, and on his half-parted lips had
gathered many flies. I beckoned to the doctor. “He’s not going to
England,” I whispered; “he’s going to sleep in France.” The surgeon,
after a quick glance, gave an order, and two bearers came and lifted the
stretcher, and bore it to a ramshackle outhouse which they call the
mortuary, and gently set it down at the end of a long row of other
silent forms.
As I passed out through the gateway in the wall which surrounds Hospital
Number Eight, I saw a group of children playing in the street. “Come
on,” shrilled one of them, “let’s play soldier!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
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