There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station,
organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the
autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through the city
and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments
abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who
took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he
had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did
not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years
later, at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless
after five months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had
bitten me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead.
“Trench fever,” said the doctor.
“You look in need of a rest,” said the matron. “My word, how white you
are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?”
I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed
between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the
New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers
lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.
“That's all right. You're going to die!” said a rosy--cheeked young
orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his
way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed
in the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in
reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of
silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy
with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a
pile of books at his elbow--all by Anatole France. It was the first time
I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but
interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand
girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back
more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, “Good night, all!” and
the night nurse took her place, and made a first visit to each bed. She
was a dainty little woman with the complexion of a delicate rose and
large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a
spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these men, who were
like children in her hands. They seemed glad at her coming.
“Good evening, sister!” said one man after another, even one who had
laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on
his face.
She knelt down beside each one, saying, “How are you to-night?” and
chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I
heard a boy's voice say: “Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given
me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am passionately in love with
you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!”
There was a gust of laughter in the ward.
“The child is at it again!” said one of the officers.
“When are you going to write me another sonnet?” asked the nurse. “The
last one was much admired.”
“The last one was rotten,” said the boy. “I have written a real corker
this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these
swine.”
“Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all.”
An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the
bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas.
“I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I
don't want to die! I want to be loved!... I'm a glutton for love!”
In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who was
mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his
tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been
Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him.
It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his
clothes he snuggled under them again and said: “All right, I'll be good.
Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep.”
I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and
a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the
muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish
wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life.
But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months
afterward. The child was “Missing” then, and her heart cried out for
him.
Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire--I suppose he
had been in a cotton-mill or a factory--a hard-headed, simple-hearted
fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of “the wife.” But his
nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the
dreams that came to him.
“Sister,” he said, “don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me
dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't
bear it.”
“You will sleep better to-night,” she said. “I am putting something in
your milk. Something to stop the dreaming.”
But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man
opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a
long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in
a dazed way, saying:
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” trembling with fear, so that the bed was
shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he
called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.
“I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep,” he told me.
“It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown
off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it? Nerves, you
know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this war.”
The little night nurse came to my bedside.
“Can't you sleep?”
“I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?”
She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.
“Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep.”
In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red
glasses, and now and then all through the night matches were lighted,
illuminating the room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a
cigarette shining like a star in the darkness.
The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave strange
jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.
“That isn't a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell.”
“Now then, get on with it, can't you?”
“Look out! They're coming! Can't you see them moving by the wire?”
The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep;
lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness. Sights which
they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids.
The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day
nurse shook one's shoulders and said: “Time to wash and shave. No
malingering!”
It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit up
in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.
“You're merciless!” I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed
my back with cold iodine at six o'clock on a winter morning, with the
windows wide open.
“Oh, there's no mercy in this place!” said the strong-minded girl. “It's
kill or cure here, and no time to worry.”
“You're all devils,” said the New Zealand general. “You don't care a
damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the
time the doctor comes around. I'm a general, I am, and you can't order
ME about, and if you think I'm going to shave at this time in the
morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and don't
you forget it. I didn't get through the Dardanelles to be murdered at
Amiens.”
“That's where you may be mistaken, general,” said the imperturbable
girl. “I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it's
not my responsibility. I'm paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my
duty, rough or smooth, kill or cure.”
“You're a vampire. That's what you are.”
“I'm a nurse.”
“If ever I hear you're going to marry a New Zealand boy I'll warn him
against you.”
“He'll be too much of a fool to listen to you.”
“I've a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning.”
“Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!”
* * *
Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark
was the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone. There
was a frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber
between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the
anti--aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those
officers who had come down from the fighting--lines nerve-racked and
fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from
bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no
other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that time, though
they had done the hero's job all right.
It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an
officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, “If there is another air raid
I shall go mad.” He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les
Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over
sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until
he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients
had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.