"Please give us a drop of Johnnie Walker before you do my dressing,"
said my Irish sergeant, who had lost his leg in the fight at Kangata.
Lest you might think that by "Johnnie Walker" he asked for his favourite
brand of whiskey, I may tell you that we had no stimulant of that kind
with us. It was chloroform he wanted to dull the pain that dressing his
severed nerves entailed. Always full of cheer and blarney, he kept our
ward alive, only when the time for daily dressing came round did his
countenance fall. Then anxious eyes begged for ease from pain. But this
once over, he laid his tired dirty face upon the embroidered pillow and
jested of all the things the careful German housewife would say could
she but see her embroidered sheets and the blue silk cushion from her
drawing-room that kept his amputated leg from jars. We had no water to
wash the men, barely enough for cooking and for surgical dressings, but
there were silk bedspreads and eiderdown quilts and all the treasures of
German sitting-rooms. And the fact that they were taken from the Germans
was balm to these wounded men.
There was Murray, a regimental sergeant-major, his leg badly broken by
the lead slug from a German Askari's rifle, ever the fore-most at the
padre's services, chanting the responses and leading all the hymns. And
Wehmeyer, the young Boer, who had accidentally blown a great hole
through his leg above the ankle joint. And Green, the Rhodesian sergeant
who had been brought in, almost _in extremis_, with blackwater. Nor was
his condition improved by the experience of having been blown up in the
ambulance by a land mine, hidden in the thick dust of the road. Thrown
into the air by the force of the explosion, the car had turned over on
him and the driver, who was killed. And there was Becker the blue-eyed
German prisoner with a bullet through his femoral artery and his hip.
Blanched from loss of blood before I could tie the vessel and stanch the
bleeding, his leg suspended in our improvised splints, and on his way to
make a splendid recovery. And Taube, another German prisoner, shot
through the abdomen, and recovering after his operation. Gentle and
conciliatory, with eyes of a frightened rabbit, he was the son of the
great Taube, the physiologist of Dresden.
Cheek by jowl, in the best bed, was Zahn, the hated Ober-Leutenant,
loathed by his own men, one of whom wrote in his diary that he loved to
see the bombardment of Tanga, "for Zahn was there, the ----, and I hope
he'll meet a 12-inch shell." Jealous of his officer's prerogative, and
disinclined to be nursed in the same ward with our soldiers and his own,
he gave a lot of trouble, demanding inordinately, victimising our
orderly, unashamedly selfish. But he was sheltered from my wrath by the
grave gunshot wound of his thigh. Cowardly under suffering, he was in
striking contrast to Becker, who stood graver pain with hardly a flinch.
After a great struggle he was eventually moved to Korogwe to the
stationary hospital. There it became necessary to amputate his leg, and
Zahn surrendered what little courage he had left. "No leg to-night, no
Zahn to-morrow," he said to his nurse. And he was right, for at eleven
that night he had no leg, and at two the next morning there was no Zahn
upon this earth.
And there was Sergeant Eve of the South African Infantry, who got a
D.C.M., a Londoner, and of unquenchable good humour. Vastly pleased with
the daily bottle of stout we got for him with such difficulty, from
supplies, he faced the awful daily dressing of his shattered leg without
flinching, pretending to great comfort and an excellent position of his
splint, which his crooked leg and my practised eye belied.
And there was Smith, yet a boy, but who always felt "champion" and
"quite comfortable," though his days were few in the land and his pain
must have been very severe. Yet in his case he had days of that merciful
euthanasia, the wonderful ease from pain that sometimes lasts for days
before the end. In great contrast with these was an individual with a
wound through the fleshy part of the thigh, by far the least seriously
wounded of all in the ward, who never failed with his unending requests
to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public
dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I
had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that
allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown away with
discarded dressings.
But, of all, the perfect prince was De La Motte, a subaltern in the 29th
Punjabis, ever the leader of the dangerous patrols along the native bush
paths that give themselves so readily to ambush. Shot through the spine
and paralysed below the waist his life was only a question of months.
But if he had little time to live, he had determined to see it through
with a gay courage that was wonderful to see. Previously wounded in
France, he yet seemed, though he cannot possibly have been in ignorance,
to be buoyed up with the perfect faith in recovery with which fractured
spines so often are endowed; never asking me awkward questions, he made
it so easy for me to do his daily dressing, so grateful for small
attentions, and so ready to believe me when I told him that it was only
a question of weeks before he would be home again. And in spite of all
fears I have just heard he did get home to see his people, and by his
cheerful courage to rob Death of all his terrors.