THE CAUSE
The Belgian Red Cross may well be proud of the hospital at La Panne.
It is modern, thoroughly organised, completely equipped. Within two
weeks of the outbreak of the war it was receiving patients. It was not
at the front then. But the German tide has forced itself along until
now it is almost on the line.
Generally speaking, order had taken the place of the early chaos in
the hospital situation when I was at the front. The British hospitals
were a satisfaction to visit. The French situation was not so good.
The isolated French hospitals were still in need of everything, even
of anæsthetics. The lack of an organised nursing system was being
keenly felt.
But the early handicaps of unpreparedness and overwhelming numbers of
patients had been overcome to a large extent. Scientific management
and modern efficiency had stepped in. Things were still capable of
improvement. Gentlemen ambulance drivers are not always to be depended
on. Nurses are not all of the same standard of efficiency. Supplies of
one sort exceeded the demand, while other things were entirely
lacking. Food of the kind that was needed by the very ill was scarce,
expensive and difficult to secure at any price.
But the things that have been done are marvellous. Surgery has not
failed. The stereoscopic X-ray and antitetanus serum are playing their
active part. Once out of the trenches a soldier wounded at the front
has as much chance now as a man injured in the pursuit of a peaceful
occupation.
Once out of the trenches! For that is the question. The ambulances
must wait for night. It is not in the hospitals but in the ghastly
hours between injury and darkness that the case of life or death is
decided. That is where surgical efficiency fails against the brutality
of this war, where the Red Cross is no longer respected, where it is
not possible to gather in the wounded under the hospital flag, where
there is no armistice and no pity. This is war, glorious war, which
those who stay at home say smugly is good for a nation.
But there are those who are hurt, not in the trenches but in front of
them. In that narrow strip of No Man's Land between the confronting
armies, and extending four hundred and fifty miles from the sea
through Belgium and France, each day uncounted numbers of men fall,
and, falling, must lie. The terrible thirst that follows loss of blood
makes them faint; the cold winds and snows and rains of what has been
a fearful winter beat on them; they cannot have water or shelter. The
lucky ones die, but there are some that live, and live for days. This
too is war, glorious war, which is good for a nation, which makes its
boys into men, and its men into these writhing figures that die so
slowly and so long.
I have seen many hospitals. Some of the makeshifts would be amusing
were they not so pathetic. Old chapels with beds and supplies piled
high before the altar; kindergarten rooms with childish mottoes on the
walls, from which hang fever charts; nuns' cubicles thrown open to
doctors and nurses as living quarters.
At La Panne, however, there are no makeshifts. There are no wards, so
called. But many of the large rooms hold three beds. All the rooms are
airy and well lighted. True, there is no lift, and the men must be
carried down the staircases to the operating rooms on the lower floor,
and carried back again. But the carrying is gently done.
There are two operating rooms, each with two modern operating tables.
The floors are tiled, the walls, ceiling and all furnishings white.
Attached to the operating rooms is a fully equipped laboratory and an
X-ray room. I was shown the stereoscopic X-ray apparatus by which the
figure on the plate stands out in relief, like any stereoscopic
picture. Every large hospital I saw had this apparatus, which is
invaluable in locating bullets and pieces of shell or shrapnel. Under
the X-ray, too, extraction frequently takes place, the operators using
long-handled instruments and gloves that are soaked in a solution of
lead and thus become impervious to the rays so destructive to the
tissues.
Later on I watched Doctor DePage operate at this hospital. I was put
into a uniform, and watched a piece of shell taken from a man's brain
and a great blood clot evacuated. Except for the red cross on each
window and the rattle of the sash under the guns, I might have been in
one of the leading American hospitals and war a century away. There
were the same white uniforms on the surgeons; the same white gauze
covering their heads and swathing their faces to the eyes; the same
silence, the same care as to sterilisation; the same orderly rows of
instruments on a glass stand; the same nurses, alert and quiet; the
same clear white electric light overhead; the same rubber gloves, the
same anæsthetists and assistants.
It was twelve minutes from the time the operating surgeon took the
knife until the wound was closed. The head had been previously shaved
by one of the assistants, and painted with iodine. In twelve minutes
the piece of shell lay in my hand. The stertorous breathing was
easier, bandages were being adjusted, the next case was being
anæsthetised and prepared.
I wish I could go further. I wish I could follow that peasant-soldier
to recovery and health. I wish I could follow him back to his wife and
children, to his little farm in Belgium. I wish I could even say he
recovered. But I cannot. I do not know. The war is a series of
incidents with no beginning and no end. The veil lifts for a moment
and drops again.
I saw other cases brought down for operation at the Ambulance Ocean.
One I shall never forget. Here was a boy again, looking up with
hopeful, fully conscious eyes at the surgeons. He had been shot
through the spine. From his waist down he was inert, helpless. He
smiled. He had come to be operated on. Now all would be well. The
great surgeons would work over him, and he would walk again.
When after a long consultation they had to tell him they could not
operate, I dared not look at his eyes.
Again, what is he to do? Where is he to go? He is helpless, in a
strange land. He has no country, no people, no money. And he will
live, think of it!
I wish I could leaven all this with something cheerful. I wish I could
smile over the phonograph playing again and again A Wee
Deoch-an'-Doris in that room for convalescents that overlooks the sea.
I wish I could think that the baby with both legs off will grow up
without missing what it has never known. I wish I could be reconciled
because the dead young officer had died the death of a patriot and a
soldier, or that the boy I saw dying in an upper room, from shock and
loss of blood following an amputation, is only a pawn in the great
chess game of empires. I wish I could believe that the two women on
the floor below, one with both arms gone, another with one arm off and
her back ripped open by a shell, are the legitimate fruits of a holy
war. I cannot. I can see only greed and lust of battle and ambition.
In a bright room I saw a German soldier. He had the room to himself.
He was blue eyed and yellow haired, with a boyish and contagious
smile. He knew no more about it all than I did. It must have
bewildered him in the long hours that he lay there alone. He did not
hate these people. He never had hated them. It was clear, too, that
they did not hate him. For they had saved a gangrenous leg for him
when all hope seemed ended. He lay there, with his white coverlet
drawn to his chin, and smiled at the surgeon. They were evidently on
the best of terms.
"How goes it?" asked the surgeon cheerfully in German.
"_Sehr gut_," he said, and eyed me curiously.
He was very proud of the leg, and asked that I see it. It was in a
cast. He moved it about triumphantly. Probably all over Germany, as
over France and this corner of Belgium, just such little scenes occur
daily, hourly.
The German peasant, like the French and the Belgian, is a peaceable
man. He is military but not militant. He is sentimental rather than
impassioned. He loves Christmas and other feast days. He is not
ambitious. He fights bravely, but he would rather sing or make a
garden.
It is over the bent shoulders of these peasants that the great
Continental army machines must march. The German peasant is poor,
because for forty years he has been paying the heavy tax of endless
armament. The French peasant is poor, because for forty years he has
been struggling to recover from the drain of the huge war indemnity
demanded by Germany in 1871. The Russian peasant toils for a remote
government, with which his sole tie is the tax-gatherer; toils with
childish faith for The Little Father, at whose word he may be sent to
battle for a cause of which he knows nothing.
Germany's militarism, England's navalism, Russia's autocracy, France,
graft-ridden in high places and struggling for rehabilitation after a
century of war--and, underneath it all, bearing it on bent shoulders,
men like this German prisoner, alone in his room and puzzling it out!
It makes one wonder if the result of this war will not be a great and
overwhelming individualism, a protest of the unit against the mass; if
Socialism, which has apparently died of an ideal, will find this ideal
but another name for tyranny, and rise from its grave a living force.
Now and then a justifiable war is fought, for liberty perhaps, or like
our Civil War, for a great principle. There are wars that are
inevitable. Such wars are frequently revolutions and have their
origins in the disaffection of a people.
But here is a world war about which volumes are being written to
discover the cause. Here were prosperous nations, building wealth and
culture on a basis of peace. Europe was apparently more in danger of
revolution than of international warfare. It is not only war without a
known cause, it is an unexpected war. Only one of the nations involved
showed any evidence of preparation. England is not yet ready. Russia
has not yet equipped the men she has mobilised.
Is this war, then, because the balance of power is so nicely adjusted
that a touch turns the scale, whether that touch be a Kaiser's dream
of empire or the eyes of a Czar turned covetously toward the South?
I tried to think the thing out during the long nights when the sound
of the heavy guns kept me awake. It was hard, because I knew so
little, nothing at all of European politics, or war, or diplomacy.
When I tried to be logical, I became emotional. Instead of reason I
found in myself only a deep resentment.
I could see only that blue-eyed German in his bed, those cheery and
cold and ill-equipped Belgians drilling on the sands at La Panne.
But on one point I was clear. Away from all the imminent questions
that filled the day, the changing ethics of war, its brutalities, its
hideous necessities, one point stood out clear and distinct. That the
real issue is not the result, but the cause of this war. That the
world must dig deep into the mire of European diplomacy to find that
cause, and having found it must destroy it. That as long as that cause
persists, be it social or political, predatory or ambitious, there
will be more wars. Again it will be possible for a handful of men in
high place to overthrow a world.
And one of the first results of the discovery of that cause will be a
demand of the people to know what their representatives are doing.
Diplomacy, instead of secret whispering, a finger to its lips, must
shout from the housetops. Great nations cannot be governed from
cellars. Diplomats are not necessarily conspirators. There is such a
thing as walking in the sunlight.
There is no such thing in civilisation as a warlike people. There are
peaceful people, or aggressive people, or military people. But there
are none that do not prefer peace to war, until, inflamed and roused
by those above them who play this game of empires, they must don the
panoply of battle and go forth.