Hot, sweating, dusty, and tired, with no inclination whatever to move
out of camp, everybody would find all the indications of approaching
disease every day if he were only to think of such a thing. The
reading of a liver advertisement in one of the home papers would show
all your symptoms, only they all would be "more so." But every one
knew it was only the climate, the hard work, and sometimes the
indifferent food, and so went on; but a day comes when the food
becomes absolutely distasteful, when the appetite begins to go. A long
day's riding on the veldt should leave one with a voracious appetite
for dinner, but when one comes in and can taste nothing, and only
just lies down dog-tired day after day, then he begins to think there
is something wrong. The idea of going to the doctor is very
distasteful, so he struggles on, hoping to work it off, until one day
he comes very near a collapse, with head swimming and knees groggy,
and then some comrade makes the doctor have a look at him, and his
temperature is perhaps 102 to 104. In Ladysmith it was then a question
of being sent out to Intombi Camp. To most men this seemed like being
exiled to Siberia; but there was no help for it. Comrades said
good-bye when it would have been more cheering to have said _au
revoir_. The train left for Intombi Hospital Camp at six in the
morning, carrying its load of those who had been wounded in the
previous twenty-four hours, as well as the sick. It was a sad journey
out; men could not help cursing their bad luck and wondering what
would be before them as a result of the journey, wondering if they
should ever rejoin their regiments or if their next journey would not
be back to the cemetery they were now passing on their right, growing
every day more ominously populous. The hospital camp at Intombi was a
collection of tents and large marquees, civilian doctors attending the
Volunteers and Army doctors the Regulars. There was also a
considerable number of the inhabitants of Ladysmith, not alone women
and children, but men. Hence the reason that it got christened Camp
Funk by the inhabitants that remained in the town. Situated on the
flat of the plain, on a level with the river banks, it was by no means
an ideal situation for a fever hospital, but still it was a great
thing to be out of the way of these irregularly dropping shells and to
_know_ one was away from them. "Long Tom," on Bulwana, shook the very
ground when he fired, and, with the other guns there, often got on the
nerves of many of the patients to a trying extent, and the Boers, as a
rule, started firing at sunrise, just about the time when the poor
devil who has tossed and turned through the long hours of the hot
night in fevered restlessness now from sheer exhaustion is just
sinking into sleep, to be startled by the terrific bang above his head
and the rush of the shell, like the tearing of a yacht's mainsail, as
it speeds on its arched course towards the devoted town.
A curious passive fight the patient settles down to, with a fatal
little thermometer keeping score and marking the game--a sort of
tug-of-war between doctors and Disease. The ground is marked in
degrees from 98.4 to 106, the former being normal temperature, the
later the point at which, as a rule, disease wins the game.
Take the case of a fellow the author knows intimately. He had held out
too long without going to hospital, putting down his weakness,
lassitude, and general feeling of extreme cheapness to the climate
instead of the real cause, with the result that he started on the real
struggle with a temperature of 104.8. At the very start Disease had
pulled him over nastily close to his line, and was still pulling him
over, as his temperature was rising point by point. There are various
methods of treatment--with him they fought it with a drug called
phenacetin, and to the lay mind a wonderful drug it appears. It is not
effective with every one. A man in the next bed to him might have been
taking breadcrumbs for all effect it produced. With him, however, it
worked like clockwork. No sooner was a five-grain dose swallowed than
the temperature stopped in its upward course. Then, gradually, like in
a good Turkish bath, the pores of his skin opened, and a most complete
and profuse perspiration ensued, which was allowed to go on for a
couple of hours. Then, with bed and bedclothes drenched, he lay weak,
limp, and feeling like a squeezed sponge, but with a temperature that
shows three degrees marked down towards his own line. Should there be
a nurse available the patient is washed down and put into fresh
clothes and pyjamas; if not, as was most usually the case, he lies in
his sweat, his skin chilling in patches for a while, and feeling
sticky and uncomfortable all over, but too limp to move. The drug has
a strange and wonderfully clearing effect on the brain. He feels as if
all his previous life had been passed in some land of twilight. Now he
lives in a land of glorious light--light that pervades everything. His
eyelids are closed to shut in the glorious light. He seems to have
been sitting in some dark theatre when the lights have been turned on
on a glorious transformation scene. He has circled the world and seen
its loveliest places, but only now sees how beautiful they were. In
Samoa, and the Pali at Honolulu, he sees the individual leaves
shimmering in the clear air, and then on his quickened consciousness
falls a great sense of the beauty of the world. Separate from the
beauty of the world seems the life on it, and now for the first time
his lips are pressed to her bluest veins. "I want to take your
temperature, please," as he feels the little glass tube at the dry
skin of his lips. "105.2," he hears whispered when it is withdrawn.
They think he cannot hear as he lies motionless with eyes closed. All
the three degrees have been lost, and more--it is a score for Disease.
Another dose of phenacetin--surely all that glorious, untravelled,
half-tasted world is too beautiful and rich with promise to leave, too
full of music he has not heard, too full of pictures he has not seen,
too full of unplucked laurels, of lips unkissed, of sunsets which have
not yet painted the clouds in their setting--above all, along the
passed path of his life are neglected flowers of love lying which he
has walked on with scarce a smile of thanks for the throwers, whose
hands, perchance now withering, he longs to kiss.
Temporarily the thermometer score is favourable to him again, but all
he can do is to lie very still, knowing that every feather-pressure of
strength will be wanted. Lying sideways, as he has been shifted round
by his nurse on the pillow, he hears the pump, pump of his heart. He
never noted that pumping before as he does now--quick and strenuous
it is, but still strong, without the spur of stimulants. Pump on, old
heart, he thought-speaks, and on it pumps through the long hours of
watching and waiting; and he watches as a captain might watch the
pumping of his water-logged ship. He is lucky to have a heart that
works like that. The man beside him was being given brandy every three
hours to help the action of his heart. Another thing he was lucky in
was in being free from headache. A sufferer farther down from time to
time called aloud in agony from the terrible splitting pains in his
head, while his was clear to a supersensitive degree--too clear and
active to allow of sleep--and soon came the time when he longed with a
great yearning for the sleep that would not come. It seemed cruel and
unfair that any beggar, any coolie in the fields, any convict could
have this sleep that was denied him. How he tried to fix his mind on
quiet scenes with the sound of falling water, or the sound of falling
breakers fringing the rocks of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn!
But sleep would not come; the panorama of the world spun from scene to
scene all the faster as he tossed limply and wearily. _Custos, quid de
nocte?_ How slowly passes the night, and night sleepless merges into
sleepless day, and for a week the struggle hangs on the winning line
of Disease. Each time the thermometer is drawn from his mouth an ever
new-born hope which has risen dies with the whispered score, but still
the heart pumps strenuously, telling of life and hope the while. On
the morning of the sixth day the score is down a degree. Too good to
believe in until confirmed by the midday record, and then very, very
slowly, by fractions of degrees, it shows less than the record of the
previous days. In the cool quietude of some Continental sculpture
gallery--he cannot tell where--he has seen a statue of Icarus--Icarus
just feeling the earth-spurning power of his new-given wings; Icarus
on tip-toe, with head up and godly-moulded chest and dilated nostrils,
drinking in the clear air, and extended arms towards his new
possession of the clouds. The glorious embodiment of god-like life,
earth-spurning, heavens-enjoying--and as such he feels--he forgets
that his frame is a skin-covered skeleton, that his legs would not
bear him upright. He knows only that the spirit of life has been
breathed into him again, and that it is very good to be alive. The
feeling of being "half in love with easeful death" has passed. The
orchestra of life will play for him again. How irksomely slow the days
pass until the score reaches his winning-line of normal! and in time
he sees how easily it might have been otherwise. His room-mate on his
right got delirious, and refused all nourishment. He struggled
violently even against the stimulants prescribed for him. His nurse
would spend half an hour trying to get a little down. Then he had seen
an extreme attempt made to feed him one night. He was held while a
tube was passed through the back of his nose and so down his throat,
but no sooner was it down than the strength of fever, like that of a
maniac, proved too strong for his nurses; they could no longer hold
him. There was a horrible struggle, with choking coughs and dark blood
flowing from his nostrils, and the brandy was spilt on his face and
smarting in his eyes. He spent days dying, and more rapid and more
feeble grew his pulse, and many times the nurse said there was none
perceptible, and then the life would flicker up again. One morning
early a bugle sounded outside. He said, "I am on outpost duty to-day;
I must get up at once." He half lifted himself in the bed, repeating,
"I tell you I am on outpost duty." The nurse pressed him back gently,
and he died. He seemed to have no friends or relatives, no one who
knew anything about him. There was a letter found in his pocket
showing that he had a mother in a village in Ireland, and that he was
her only son.
On the other side of our friend was a poor fellow unceasingly racked
with pain either in head or abdomen. His temperature was not
extremely high, but he seemed to be falling away from the pain of the
poisonous disease. His pulse was weak, and had to be kept going with
constant stimulants. When in the ordinary course of things the disease
should have passed he got a series of rigors and shivering fits about
every third day, with a cold sweat. While the shivering was on him his
temperature would drop to normal or lower, and then bound up to 103 or
104. He had a terrible dread of these fits, and it was pitiful to see
him watching their oncoming. Each one that came left him weaker as it
passed off.
We are coming back to England in a ship laden with the human wreckage
of war--the wounded, the maimed, the sick, who to their graves will
carry the maiming of their sickness. There are, amongst these men,
those who will crawl about the world lop-sided, incomplete cripples,
or those who will be perpetually victims to intermittent or chronic
disease; but there is a worse than any of these disasters to the
victim. The man without a leg can get along with a crutch. We know one
who lost both legs in Egypt who goes about on a little four-wheeled
wooden cart, propelling himself with his hands, and haunts the
precincts of a certain club, where the members, seeing the badge which
he still wears in his cap, often give him enough to get drunk on. The
man who loses his sight from the earth-scattering shell can at worst
carry a label to tell that he was blinded in the war, and his
charitable fellow-countrymen will give him enough to keep him enjoying
life through the channels of the four other senses, and he will still
admit that it is good to be alive. Blindness is bad, but war deals
worse blows than in the eyes. It deals blows under which the reason
itself staggers and is maimed. The lunatic asylum is worse than the
hospital. We are carrying back nine men who have lost their reason at
Magersfontein and other battles; two have been mercifully treated and
have lost it completely--the padded cell must mean a certain
unconsciousness; but the greatest, deepest pity of which the human
heart is capable is called forth by those who are maimed in mind. Long
lucid intervals of perfect sanity give them time to learn the meaning
of the locks and bars. "Yes, I know; I went off my head after
Magersfontein," one poor fellow tells you; another repeatedly asks,
"Will they put me into an asylum when I go home?" What a home-coming!
Sure enough it is to the asylum they are going. They will be lost to
what friends or relatives they have in that oblivion of a living
grave. When their comrades return, not the faintest echo of the
cheering will reach their cells. Men do not like to talk of madness;
they will point with pride and pity to chums and comrades bearing
honourable wounds, but these poor wretches will just disappear, lost
in the great aftermath of war. We still have the expressions
"frightened out of his senses" or "frightened out of his wits," and
here are instances of its actually occurring, the strain on nerves
being more than the brains of these men could stand. Is it that their
nervous organisation has become more highly strung and bears the
strain less sturdily than in times past, or that there is for some
minds a hidden terror in the sightless, invisible death that whistles
over them as they lie belly-pressing the earth in the face of an
unseeable foe? It is not inconceivable that this may have an effect
like some horrible nightmare amid all the glare of daylight on some
minds. The man is held there in terror by the worse terror of running
away; a comrade on his right grows callous by waiting, and to relieve
the wants of nature raises himself up and gets hit; the thirst of
another overcomes him, and he runs to fill his water-bottle and falls;
and all day long, through heat and hunger and thirst, he is held there
in a vice of increasing terror, like a child left in the dark denied
the language of a cry. It takes strong nerves to stand that strain, we
all must admit who have any personal knowledge of what it means; and
what a gathering up of the reins of self-control we often experience!
What wonder, then, that weak nerves cannot stand it, but sometimes
break down under the strain? Such a collapse has a way of being
regarded as the uttermost sign of abject cowardice, which by no means
follows--nervous men are frequently the bravest of the brave. The
refinement of modern shooting-irons seems to call for a certain
corresponding refinement of courage--the cold, steel-like courage that
can stand and wait, and win by the waiting of their stand.