Miss Taylor and I are in our cozy office waiting for the time for the
evening report, which won’t be for about half an hour yet. We have both
been to first supper and will now rest ourselves a little for this half
hour. She has decided to do a picture puzzle. I wish you all could see
how nice our office is. We have the tiniest coal stove that ever
existed, and yet it is just the right size for this place. We have been
having a fire in it for the past few days, for it has been very cold
and raining almost every day. An orderly with a lantern has just come in
out of the darkness to tell us that sixty cases are on the way to the
hospital now and sixty more are coming at midnight. We are just about
full to capacity, but every day we send out some, so every day we can
take more in. I have been off duty a couple of hours late this
afternoon, the first time off since I got back from Paris last Tuesday.
Phil, who is walking a little with me every day, came up to our mess for
tea this afternoon and afterwards I walked with him around the race
track. He was pretty glad to get back to bed after this rather lengthy
expedition. His wound is very nearly closed. It has done remarkably
well. After I left him being put to bed by the nice convalescent patient
who looks after him, I went down to the evening service in the Y. M. C.
A. hut, the Sunday evening Episcopal service that comes just before the
Non-conformist service.
Dean Davis conducted the service, and how I wished that some of his St.
Louis parishioners could have seen him. His audience in that rough hut
was about 200 convalescent patients in their blue suits, with heads or
arms bandaged, or coughing, coughing the way so many of our poor gassed
men cough. There were a few English Sisters and V. A. D.’s there, but I
was the only American, this evening. I wish you could hear these men
sing. There is nothing like the singing that I’ve heard the Tommies do.
Their deep voices singing in unison, and with great earnestness such
words as “Plenteous grace with thee is found, Grace to cleanse from
every sin, Let the healing streams abound, Make and keep me pure
within,” can never be forgotten. The Dean spoke briefly, but right out
from the shoulder to them from that chapter in the letter to the
Ephesians about, “Lie not, for ye are members one of another, and let
him that stole, steal no more but rather let him work, that he may have
wherewith to give to him that hath need,” etc. There was more about
tenderness, and growing in grace.
Speaking of tenderness, I have never in all my life seen such tenderness
as these men show to each other. If you could see, as we so often see,
men with horrible leg injuries reaching way over to feed the man in the
bed next to them, who may have arm injuries and be helpless. And always
the up-patients are so good to the bedridden ones. Our hospital simply
could not run without the help of the patients themselves. They fetch
and carry and bathe and scrub and hold legs and arms for dressings, and
joke and jolly each other along till it would break your heart, for they
themselves are sick men. For our up-patients here have been mighty sick
or they would have been sent on to England, unless they are some of the
few that are going back to the Convalescent Camp and from there back
into the lines. So often, too, we see a man reach way over from his bed
to give his neighbor a puff at his cigarette.
I have felt so rich recently, for I got such a wonderful lot of letters,
all in one batch. How I did enjoy them. All the family ones I took right
down to read with Phil in his little tent. We had a regular orgy.
It’s now Friday, the 18th, and such a lovely day as it has been, clear
and sunny and cold. I had a little walk with Ruth just after lunch and
it reminded us of November days at home, except for what we saw. For all
we saw was camps, camps, camps and soldiers of every sort. We did not
have time to go beyond the area of camps, but off in the distance we
could see the lovely ridges that make the edge of this little basin that
Rouen is in. When we came back, I walked a few minutes with Phil. It
takes a long time for his strength to come back, poor boy. He is awfully
good and patient and as little trouble as a person could be. I think he
is a little depressed to-day by his feeling of mimsiness, and the being
out of things. He finds it harder to be up a little every day, for, as
he says, when he is dressed he looks like every one else, and then he
can’t do like them at all. When he was in bed all the time, he did not
mind his incapacitation so much. Now is the time that he needs petting
and amusing and fussing over. His injury was no little thing and he is
being a marvel of goodness about it all, but it is beastly hard for him,
to have to hang around and wait to get strong. After a little while I am
going to see what can be done about convalescence in some better place.
It is hard to know whether a convalescent home for officers in the south
of France, alone without his friends and me, would do him more good than
these plain doings and all of us. When he can get about a bit more, he
will find it more interesting; for then I can go down town to meals with
him and take walks, and he can do those things with other people too. He
has had a hard experience, but it is doing big things for him, I can see
that plainly. I am so glad he is here with me. I can never be grateful
enough.
Our great busyness has continued all week though we have not been quite
full to the limit. On Monday last, Major Murphy and his team, and Capt.
Post and his team, returned from their Clearing Stations. Each team had
one nurse. I wish so much you could know what those people have been
doing and going through. You really would hardly believe their tales.
They are all absolutely tired out. Major Murphy seems to be in the best
condition, but he said he was dreadfully tired. The nurses are almost
all in. We made them stay in bed 36 hours and have started them off on
the easiest places we could find for them. But it will take a good many
weeks, I am afraid, before they will sleep properly and not dream about
stopping hemorrhages, and stop smelling the smells they smelled up
there. What with the steam, the ether, and the filthy clothes of the
men, which they had to cut off before they could begin to start, the
odor in the operating room was so terrible that it was all that any of
them could do to keep from being sick. One of my nurses was sick at her
stomach all night long the first night she worked there, and just ran in
and out all night, but kept right on with her work, though she says that
if she lives to be a hundred and fifty years old, she will never forget
that night. One doctor and one nurse work at each table and you can
imagine what surgical work the nurse has to do, no mere handing of
instruments and sponges, but sewing and tying up and putting in drains
while the doctor takes the next piece of shell out of another place.
Then after fourteen hours of this, with freezing feet, to a meal of tea
and bread and jam, and off to rest if you can in a wet bell tent in a
damp bed without sheets, after a wash with a cupful of water.
The trip down from the front was very hard. They all came by train this
time. One team after a long train trip arrived at a fair-sized coast
town at 2 P.M. The doctor tried to get a room at the hotel for the
nurse, who was dead with cold and fatigue, but all the rooms had been
taken by officers going through on their way to posts. Their train was
to go out at one A.M., so the doctor only wanted the room for the
evening for this nurse. Finally the proprietor said he would let the
nurse have the room of an officer who had gone out for the evening but
he was expected in at twelve. But that seemed fine, so the nurse had a
little rest in this man’s room, but at twelve was called, for the
officer had come back and was waiting outside the door. The rest of the
night she sat up in a freezing French railway carriage, the only woman
with her doctor, her two orderlies, and two Tommies. The Tommies and the
orderlies piled up on each other and went sound to sleep, but she and
the doctor waggled and jolted through the miserable, damp, cold night.
They reached here at one o’clock the next afternoon, and really had come
so few miles as the crow flies. How I wished for a warm bathroom and a
quiet cozy sleeping place for these weary, dirty, splendid women of
mine. But willing, eager hands brought pitchers of hot water and put
hot-water bags in little beds that are clean if small, and brought trays
of food, and now after two days both of the nurses are looking a little
less green and black around the eyes. And how glad and grateful we are
to have them back. There are two more away, and another is probably to
go soon, and she is none the less eager after hearing the tales of the
others. Major Murphy says the experience is, of course, very wonderful,
but it is brutal. He means brutal on the teams. But English men and
women have been doing this for months and months. This was a very big
push that these two teams have been through. It is a marvel to me that
human beings can stand it all.
October 30, 1917.