Part 3

A nurse--the one known as the _mitrailleuse_--at that instant passed his bed.

“What’s the matter with him?” she demanded brusquely. “What’s he shaking for?”

“The operation,” I said. “He fears it. It’s the strain he’s been under so long----”

“Pooh!” she broke out impatiently. “Some of these men can’t stand pain any better than a baby!”

As the days and the weeks go by the ward changes. Men recover or die, or are discharged to convalescent hospitals; and fresh wrecks appear in their places, sleep in their beds, and smile up to one from the pillow. The big _salle_ is an antechamber, with exits leading both ways--out into the great adventure of life and out into the still greater adventure of death. At the end of three months scarcely a single familiar face remains. But the exit leading back into life is always open. The recovered men return.

An aviator, whose leg had been amputated at the hospital, comes to announce that he is to have the honor of returning to the Front. He is the last of his class of eight--and he must fly with a wooden leg.

Even Claudius has been discharged. He has gone home to his mother and sister, of whom he is the sole support. A letter from him lies before me.

“My leg is no good,” he writes, “and I never shall be able to use it to work. What shall I do? I shall have to ride that leg all day in a carriage! But where am I to get the carriage? I shall go to America! Do you think some rich--and pretty--young American mees would marry me and let me ride in her carriage?”

That, indeed, would be a solution for Claudius! And I am making his modest wants known, with the hopes that some pretty--and rich--young American “mees” may wish to take a flyer on a young Frenchman, considerably smashed but with his sense of humor intact. If she should, and can guarantee the carriage, I will send her Claudius’ address.

WITH THE FRENCH WOUNDED

Every hour wounds; The last one kills.

_Old French Couplet on the Clock Tower of the American Ambulance, at Neuilly._

When, one morning in Paris, I received orders to report without delay to the big American war hospital in Neuilly, and begin work there as a volunteer nurse’s aid, I suddenly found myself reluctant, even rebellious; though it was precisely for that reason, and no other, that I had come to France. But I had just arrived in Paris and already that city of enchantments had cast its spell on me. I did not want to work--I never want to work. I wanted, I scarcely knew what: to taste Paris again; to breathe her air, which affects one like a mild champagne; to stroll about and enjoy her noble proportions and beautiful distances. I did not wish to be swallowed up immediately by another piece of work, no matter how fine or inspiring.

There were a few special, little, no-account personal things I wished to do first; I wanted to revisit the tomb of Napoleon and ask the little old gentleman reposing down there below what he thought of the present situation; I wanted to renew acquaintance with Rodin’s statue, The Thinker, in front of the Panthéon, to see whether it cast as big a shadow as ever; I wanted to wander through the leafy alleys of the Luxembourg Garden, decorated with marble gods and goddesses and given over to the naïve delights of student lovers; I wanted to stroll once more up the Champs-Elysées in the twilight and see the Arc de Triomphe, gravely beautiful, looming solidly against the sky; I wanted to view again the statue of Jeanne d’Arc; I wanted to taste once more some Vouvray and see whether the world would turn into an enchanted bubble again; I wanted to discover whether the same immemorial fishermen were still fishing on the banks of the Seine--for dead cats, Mark Twain declared. These are but seven samples of the things I wanted to do. In brief, I wanted to loaf.

“But you can’t!” said the crisp English nurse executive at the hospital, to whom I confided these noble ambitions. “In the first place, we need you. In the second place, we’ve got to have you. And in the third place, Paris just now is no place for loafers. With this present offensive on and so many of our staff completely worn out--do you know there are women working here who have not had a day off in twenty months?--we need every pair of hands that are available. Now, when can you come? Monday?”

This was Wednesday, and there was a nurse’s outfit to buy, matriculation papers to procure at the Préfecture, and other odds and ends of official red tape to tie, which would take every hour of my time. But I was conquered. I acquiesced. My hopes of a holiday went a-glimmering. Hereafter, what I see of Paris in wartime will be hasty glimpses, caught on the fly; for it will be dark when I rise, at six-thirty, button myself into my _infirmière’s_ blouse, swallow my morning draft of chicory _au lait_, whose sole virtue is that it is so hot it scalds me all the way down; and it is dark again when in the evening, at six-thirty, the day’s work done, I bundle into the Red Cross omnibus, which takes the auxiliary workers back to the Subway.

During the first week in the hospital the sheer physical strain was terrific. It seemed as if I were in a strange, mad, nightmare world, where everything was reversed; instead of health--disease, and mangled and torn bodies and suppurating wounds, some of them hideously green and yellow, like decayed meat; and smashed wrecks of men, with arms and legs swung up on apparatus that resembled nothing so much as the old torture racks of the Inquisition; as if shrieks and cries and groans and smells were the natural and normal order of things. For days I was nauseated. The sight of raw mangled flesh, the blood-saturated linen, the stench of gangrenous wounds, the nervous strain of bandaging freshly amputated stumps, and the screams of the dressing hour simply bombarded the unaccustomed senses and hit the newcomer fairly in the pit of the stomach. When I confessed this to the ward surgeon he laughed.

“That’s nothing--the rebellion of healthy nature against disease. When I was at the Front, at the commencement of the war, at one of the base hospitals, I used to retire and gag at regular intervals. It was awful, for we had nothing to work with. But mobilize your emotions. Don’t let them mobilize you. Imitate the sang-froid of the _poilu_. Yesterday I stopped by the bed of a youngster who’s had a leg off and is dying of gangrene. ‘Well, how goes it?’ I asked him. ‘_Ça va. Ça va mieux._’--It goes. It goes better, he replied simply. And he was dead up to his waist already! He was a dead man he knew it, and he knew that I knew that he knew it; and still he looked me straight in the eye and said ‘It goes. It goes better!’ There’s mobilization of spirit for you!”

Nevertheless, when the dressings were over I breathed relief. Never did I learn to control my nerves completely; to listen without a tremor to the cries of pain, the high, piercing screams, “_Oh, là, là!_” “_Ah, Nom de Dieu!_” “_Ah, doucement, docteur!_ Easy there!” “_Oh, bon Dieu_, how I suffer!” The quality of pure agony in those broken cries was too much for me.

It was on trying occasions like these that Justin, the old French orderly, came to my aid, showing me exactly how to hold a broken leg; how to wind a difficult bandage with comfort and security; how to lift a heavy patient without injury to myself or to him.

Justin deserves a separate paragraph all to himself, a separate little niche in heaven. Kipling’s celebrated Gunga Din had nothing on him--for Gunga Din had no sense, only goodness; while Justin is a Frenchman, with all a Frenchman’s natural intelligence and sardonic humor. He had been an orderly in a French military hospital for twenty years; and what he did not know about sick humanity--their weakness and irritability, their heroisms and long, long patience--was not worth knowing. From morning to night he went trotting noiselessly about the ward in his old blue list slippers; dirty aproned; squat, ugly and strong as a gorilla; vulgar, gay, resolute and as tender-fingered as a woman. And the men leaned on him as on an elder brother.

All day long it was: “Justin, a basin--quick!” “Justin, lift me up!” “Justin, this plaster cast is killing me!” “Ah, Justin, how I suffer!”

And Justin’s steady, cheerful voice would reply: “I come, _mon enfant_.” “There, _mon petit_!” “That goes better, _mon petit brave, eh_?”

Once only did I see him in a passion. Some negligent person had bound a damp bandage too tightly about a fractured leg; drying, it contracted still further; the result was acute torture. The soldier, a modest, shy lad, had appealed once or twice to a passing nurse; but the first big morning rush of dressings was on and no one heeded him. Minutes passed. The pain increased. Silently he began to weep. It was old Justin trotting past with a pail of soiled dressings who first noted the writhing young figure and caught a faint groan. He paused long enough to inquire: “What’s the matter, _petit_?”

The soldier indicated his leg. The orderly’s face darkened as he looked. He set down the pail, undid the bandage and rewound it properly, muttering angrily between his teeth the while. Presently a nurse bore down upon them. She was the one whom the men had nicknamed the old _mitrailleuse_--for reasons obvious. Competent enough technically, she had neither tenderness nor humanity nor gay spirits to commend her services to the men. She was like a soured, fibrous old schoolmistress, and the soldiers detested her cordially and, after the fashion of mischievous school-children, amused themselves by devising fresh nicknames for her each day.

Frenchmen love charm in a woman, and hate the reverse like a deformity. Accordingly, when she paused belligerently at the bedside, both Justin and the lad instinctively stiffened themselves.

“What are you doing, Justin?” she cried sharply. “Let that bandage alone!”

For an orderly to dare to rewrap a certificated nurse’s bandage is, of course, a breach of etiquette. It is a situation that requires tact; but Justin at that moment was far too angry for tact. Stolidly he continued his task. When the last safety pin was refastened he straightened himself and faced the nurse squarely.

“Some imbecile, some _cochon_ of an _infirmière_,” he began, mentioning no names, “put a wet bandage on the leg of that poor child!” And then he continued suavely, in French--of which the nurse understood nothing beyond a few scattering words: “Ancient female camel! Daughter of the union of a cannon ball and a hippopotamus: Do you conceive that I, a Frenchman and a soldier, shall not do what is good for these, my little children? _Nom de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_” And with a shrug of contempt he gathered up his slops and trotted away.

It was not long after this late one afternoon, when Justin beckoned me with a stealthy finger. By this time we had become firm allies. At noon I saved him a cup of wine from the men’s lunch and let him rest his aching feet and smoke a cigarette undisturbed behind a screen. And in return Justin taught me all the fine subtleties of his art.

“You are very amiable, mees,” he began now in a carefully lowered voice. “Will you help me?”

“What is it?” I asked; for by his conspirator air and his secrecy I knew he intended to achieve something, by his own initiative, which was against the rules.

“It’s Simondon, out on the _terrasse_,” he murmured, still in guarded tones. “His new cast hurts him. Last night he did not sleep for pain, and to-day the _pauvre petit_ has a temperature of thirty-nine. I’m going to take off that plaster and rewad it!”

“But why don’t you ask the nurse? It’s her job, really. You and I have no right to touch that cast without permission.”

“Simondon won’t let her come near. He’s crazy with the pain. They’ve decided to wait for the doctor. But the doctor is up in the operating room, and the Sacred Virgin alone knows when he will return.” He led the way to the terrace, a sleeping porch which gave on the garden.

I knew this Simondon. He had lost an eye and had a badly infected leg, due to four days and four nights spent on the field of battle, without food or water, before help came. As a consequence, of the five months spent in the hospital each separate hour had been a desperately fought struggle, a superb resistance of the spirit.

Small wonder that, after all these long months, the cool nerve that rarely deserts a Frenchman had worn down to rather a fine thread!

Upon the terrace we found him, a dark, painfully emaciated lad of twenty-one, his black hair already plentifully sprinkled with white from the hardships he had undergone. His cheeks were scarlet with fever, and in his torture he had bitten his lips until they were covered with a thin, bloody froth.

“No, no! You shan’t touch it!” he began fiercely as we came up.

“_Courage, mon petit brave!_” soothed Justin. “Ten minutes, and it’ll all be over and we’ll have you up in the wheel chair. Say, old _embusqué_! Will you have a small glass of cognac first?”

“Don’t you touch it!” breathed Simondon passionately between his teeth. “Get out of here!”

“Hold up his leg, mees!” commanded Justin calmly. “Thus!”

Obediently I held the leg, incased from thigh to heel in an open plaster cast, at the desired angle. Simondon let out a piercing yell.

“_Oh, bon Dieu! Oh, là, là! Wait!_” Tears of agony streamed down his wasted cheeks. Wildly he tried to seize my hands. “Can’t you hear me?” he sobbed. “Imbeciles! Stop!”

“Maybe we’d better,” I murmured.

But, with swift and sure precision, Justin had already begun to strip the bandages.

“Higher!” he ordered briefly.

Again Simondon made a furious swing at my wrists. Again he screamed madly.

“Let’s wait for the doctor,” I urged.

Justin never looked up.

“Don’t heed him, mees,” he said simply. “’Tis only his sickness speaking.” Wise old Justin! “Rest tranquil, _petit_,” he added; and he nodded to the young sufferer, who, suddenly docile beneath the firm, ministering hands, returned him a quivering smile of obedience. “It’s almost finished,” murmured Justin.

And indeed, in less time than it takes to tell, the cruelly binding plaster incasement was shed, extra layers of soft padding inserted, the cast readjusted and rebound; and Simondon, the tears still wet on his cheeks, was smiling happily and sipping a tiny glass of cognac. A half hour later, his fever abated and his red tasseled cap cocked rakishly over his one good eye, he was up in the wheel chair--for the first time in five months--and Justin was trundling him off for a brief promenade.

By the sheer authority of his spirit, the squat, grotesque, vulgar little old man had achieved in a few minutes what two nurses had labored vainly over for an hour. Shortly after he was on his rounds again, at his perpetual dog-trot, carrying a basin and making, as he passed me, his invariable joke--that he was taking a small gift to the Kaiser!

The first month in the big ward I was worked to death. But so was everybody else. Some of the nurses were ill, some of the auxiliaries were away, and an offensive was at its height. Consequently the rest of us worked under a terrific pressure. Ward Eighty-three, at that time the heaviest in the hospital, had over fifty beds, each one filled with a _grand blessé_. Fifty backs to wash; fifty beds to make; fifty dressings to cut down, change and rebandage; fifty bedside tables to scrub; fifty meals to serve on individual tables; fifty temperatures and pulses to take--to say nothing of a thousand and one odd jobs, such as hot compresses every hour, hot drinks, medicines, diets, wounds to irrigate, beds to disinfect, which kept nurses and aids racing dizzily straight through the day. And even then we were always behind our schedule! The work was never done.

If anyone is suffering from a broken heart or a general stagnation of life--what O. Henry called “slow pulse”--a big hospital ward during the rush of an offensive is a good place to lose it. But there are compensations; for a sick warrior is nothing after all but a sick child, docile, naïve, craving for sympathy. He wants to be consoled for his suffering; he wants to be cured. He demands everything and gives everything. And at night as I passed, dog tired, down the ward, heads were raised, hands outstretched; and the shower of cries of “_Bonsoir_, Mees!”--“_à demain_, Mees Californie!”--were sweeter than bouquets of roses thrown across the footlights to a reigning star.

There were twelve soldiers for whose welfare I was specifically responsible, and who had the right to call me to their bedsides and demand whatsoever they pleased, from an extra piece of cotton batting over their toes to the reasons why there are so many divorces in my country. Of these twelve, nine were under twenty-three and two looked not a day over sixteen, rosy cheeked and downy. After the first mists of strangeness had cleared away, and I began to view things more normally, that was the first thing that struck me--the amazing youth of the men. Despite their wounds and the stress of trench life in a brutal wintry climate, they fairly shouted life and vivid vitality. Their eyes were as clear as those of children, their laughter as fresh, their joy as spontaneous.

One morning I was washing the back of a young Breton lad whose torso, with its clean, flowing lines, would have delighted a sculptor.

“Claude,” I laughed, “you have a back almost as nice as Apollo’s.”

“Yes, mees? Truly?” he cried, blushing and deeply pleased.

I was puzzled by his delight, for Claude was a young coal miner who could not even sign his own name, and I knew he did not know Apollo from Moses. The next morning, as I was rubbing him down with alcohol, he twisted about to ask shyly:

“Mees Californie, is my back still as nice as Apollo’s?”

As I stared at him blankly he repeated the query in slightly different form; and then the truth dawned upon me: he thought Apollo was some other boy in the ward whose back didn’t have any bedsores!

It would be a great mistake to conclude that the ward of a military hospital, simply because it is the container of so much concentrated pain, is, therefore, the natural abode of sadness and gloom. In the first place, the soldiers, taken as a whole, are not sick: they are only wounded--a vast difference. Save for their injuries, the majority of them are practically well men. In the second place, they are young, and, speaking again, in the large, magnificently healthy.

Consequently the large airy ward, with its community of bedfast inhabitants, resembles a menagerie of fifty playful cubs--each chained to his own post, to be sure, but capable, nevertheless, of considerable mischief--rather than the classic conception of a sick room, with lowered lights and voices.

Pain there is, certainly, up to the limits of human endurance; but this is borne with a spirit, an ironic fortitude, which is a Frenchman’s most natural possession. A soldier suffering the refined tortures of hell during the dressing of an infected wound is yet capable of making a jest with twitching lips that will send his comrades off into spasms of laughter.

Nor is this humor an affectation. It is his instinctive reaction to pain. And, as a reverse side of the same shield, he is also capable at such times of the finest flower of courtesy, such as saying simply, “Thank you, doctor!” to the man who has just cut off his leg without ether.

But if he can and does endure intense pain superbly, it is no sign, as the schoolboys say, that he intends to endure lesser, or what he considers unnecessary ones, with like dignity. As a matter of fact, a pain in the great toe, a crease in the drawsheet, or, above all, that thing most dreaded by every Frenchman, a _courant d’air_ from an open window, will produce loud lamentation, which will set the entire ward in an uproar. For these are the small ills that can be righted, and therefore must be--and instantaneously, if you please.

An incident in point took place recently in the ward. The chief surgeon, when making his morning rounds, decided that a superficial incision of perhaps an inch should be made in a certain wound in order to permit the free passage of the Carrel-Dakin solution, the famous antiseptic irrigation which keeps down bacterial poisoning. It was not considered sufficiently important to remove the patient to the operating room, or even to administer ether. Three or four snips by the ward doctor and the thing would be done. But Georges, the party of the first part in the operation, had decided he wanted an anæsthetic. He did not intend to be hurt. He had understood that in this grand hospital _de luxe_ the Americans had the latest methods; that they did not chop a poor soldier up without first “putting him to sleep.” Vain were my efforts to soothe him.

The other men, delighted by this fantastic grievance--for most of them detest the anæsthetizing process--egged him on with a gayety that soon became riotous. They exchanged bets on the possible chances of recovery from such a grave operation. They promised to write to his mother and to his fiancée in the event of his death. One soldier, an erstwhile opera singer, consented to chant his mass. Another offered to confess him, and adjured him to make a clean breast of all his sins. At lunch, with their wine, they drank to him a solemn _morituri te salutamus_!

The day became a Fête of Death dedicated to Georges and his inch-long cut. And when at length the crucial hour arrived, and the doctor and nurse entered with a tray of glittering instruments, every man of them was up on his elbow in bed, and the opera singer began softly to chant the mass. But Georges was nowise abashed by all this jest and _blague_. As the doctor approached his bedside he began to writhe, and gasped:

“_Mon Dieu_, how I suffer! Oh! Ah! _Doucement!_--Gently!”

“_Un!_” murmured the opera singer at his side.

The nurse pulled down the covers and elicited another loud groan.

“_Oh, là, là! Doucement! Doucement!_”

“_Deux! Trois!_” counted his neighbor.

The ward meantime was one gurgle of suppressed laughter. The nurse started to undo the bandage.

“_Doucement!_” sang out Georges lustily.

“_Quatre!_”

The doctor picked up an instrument from the tray and touched the wound-opening tentatively.

“_Oh, Nom de Dieu! Oh, docteur! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement!_”

“_Cinq! Six! Sept!_”

“What’s biting you, old man?” laughed the doctor in English. “You know this doesn’t hurt.”

“_Doucement!_” roared Georges in reply.

“_Huit!_”

“I don’t understand this,” said the nurse, glancing at the chart. “He has no temperature.”

“_Doucement! Doucement!_” moaned Georges.

“_Neuf! Dix!_” registered the opera singer.

The doctor snipped off an infinitesimal flake of dead cuticle.

“_Oh, bon Dieu! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Doucement! Oh, cher docteur! Doucement!_”

“_Onze! Douze! Treize! Quatorze! Quinze!_”