Part 14

“In a typical ‘gassed’ case the idea of impending suffocation predominates. Every muscle of respiration is called upon to do its utmost to avert the threatened doom. The imperfect aeration of the blood arising from obstructed respiration causes oftentimes intense blueness and clamminess of the face, while froth and expectoration blow from the mouth impelled by a choking cough. The poor fighting man tosses and turns himself into every position in search of relief. But his efforts are unavailing; he feels that his power of breathing is failing; that asphyxiation is gradually becoming complete. The slow strangling of his respiration, of which he is fully conscious, at last enfeebles his strength. No longer is it possible for him to expel the profuse expectoration; the air-tubes of his lungs become distended with it, and with a few gasps he dies.

“If the ‘gassed’ man survives the first stage of his agony, some sleep may follow the gradual decline of the urgent symptoms, and after such sleep he feels refreshed and better. But further trouble is in store for him, for the intense irritation to which the respiratory passages have been exposed by the inhalation of the suffocating gas is quickly followed by the supervention of acute bronchitis. In such attacks death may come, owing to the severity of the inflammation. In mild cases of ‘gassing,’ on the other hand, the resulting bronchitis develops in a modified form with the result that recovery now generally follows. Time, however, can only show to what extent permanent damage to the lungs is inflicted. Possibly chronic bronchitis may be the lot of such ‘gassed’ men in after life or some pulmonary trouble equally disturbing. It is difficult to believe that they can wholly escape some evil effects.”

As soon as it was found that the immediate cause of death in the fatal gas cases was acute congestion of the lungs, the surgeons were able to treat it upon special and definite lines. Means were devised for insuring the expulsion of the excessive secretion from the lungs, thus affording much relief and making it possible to avert asphyxiation. In some apparently hopeless cases the lives of the men were saved by artificial respiration. The inhalation of oxygen was also tried with favorable results, and in cases where the restlessness of the patient was more mental than physical, opium was successfully used. So that even the poison-gas, perhaps the most dreadful death-dealing device which the war has produced, neither dismayed nor defeated the men whose task it is to save life instead of to take it.

To the surgeons and nurses at the front the people of France and England owe a debt of gratitude which they can never wholly repay. The soldiers in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic battle than these quiet, efficient, energetic men and women who wear the red badge of mercy. Their courage is shown by the enormous losses they have suffered under fire, the proportion of military doctors and hospital attendants killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, equalling the proportion of infantry losses. They have no sleep save such as they can snatch between the tides of wounded or when they drop on the floor from sheerest exhaustion. They are working under as trying conditions as doctors and nurses were ever called upon to face. They treat daily hundreds of cases, any one of which would cause a city physician to call a consultation. They are in constant peril from marauding _Taubes_, for the German airmen seem to take delight in choosing buildings flying the Red Cross flag as targets for their bombs. In their ears, both day and night, sounds the din of near-by battle. Their organization is a marvel of efficiency. That of the Germans may be as good but it can be no better.

In order that I may bring home to you in America the realities of this thing called war, I want to tell you what I saw one day in a little town called Bailleul. Bailleul is only two or three miles on the French side of the Franco-Belgian frontier, and it is so close to the firing-line that its windows continually rattle. The noise along that portion of the battle-front never ceases. It sounds for all the world like the clatter of a gigantic harvester. And that is precisely what it is—the harvester of death.

[Illustration:

_From a photograph by Meurisse._

Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders.

“The soldiers in the trenches are waging no more desperate or heroic battle than these quiet, efficient, energetic men who wear the red badge of mercy.” ]

As we entered Bailleul they were bringing in the harvest. They were bringing it in motor-cars, many, many, many of them, stretching in endless procession down the yellow roads which lead to Lille and Neuve Chapelle and Poperinghe and Ypres. Over the gray bodies of the motor-cars were gray canvas hoods, and painted on the hoods were staring scarlet crosses. The curtain at the back of each car was rolled up, and protruding from the dim interior were four pairs of feet. Sometimes those feet were wrapped in bandages, and on the fresh white linen were bright-red splotches, but more often they were incased in worn and muddied boots. I shall never forget those poor, broken, mud-incrusted boots, for they spoke so eloquently of utter weariness and pain. There was something about them that was the very essence of pathos. The owners of those boots were lying on stretchers which were made to slide into the ambulances as drawers slide into a bureau, and most of them were suffering agony such as only a woman in childbirth knows.

[Illustration:

Bringing in the harvest of the guns.

The dripping stretchers slide into the ambulances as drawers slide into a bureau. ]

This was the reaping of the grim harvester which was at its work of mowing down human beings not five miles away. Sometimes, as the ambulances went rocking by, I would catch a fleeting glimpse of some poor fellow whose wounds would not permit of his lying down. I remember one of these in particular—a clean-cut, fair-haired youngster who looked to be still in his teens. He was sitting on the floor of the ambulance leaning for support against the rail. He held his arms straight out in front of him. Both his hands had been blown away at the wrists. The head of another was so swathed in bandages that my first impression was that he was wearing a huge red-and-white turban. The jolting of the car had caused the bandages to slip. If that man lives little children will run from him in terror, and women will turn aside when they meet him on the street. And still that caravan of agony kept rolling by, rolling by. The floors of the cars were sieves leaking blood. The dusty road over which they had passed no longer needed sprinkling.

Tearing over the rough cobbles of Bailleul, the ambulances came to a halt before some one of the many doorways over which droop the Red Cross flags, for every suitable building in the little town has been converted into a hospital. The one of which I am going to tell you had been a school until the war began. It is officially known as Clearing Hospital Number Eight, but I shall always think of it as hell’s antechamber. In the afternoon that I was there eight hundred wounded were brought into that building between the hours of two and four, and this, mind you, was but one of many hospitals in the same little town. As I entered the door I had to stand aside to let a stretcher carried by two orderlies pass out. Through the rough brown blanket which covered the stretcher showed the vague outlines of a human form, but the face was covered, and it was very still. A week or two weeks or a month later, when the casualty lists were published, there appeared the name of the still form under the brown blanket, and there was anguish in some English home. In the hallway of the hospital a man was sitting upright on a bench, and two surgeons were working over him. He was sitting there because the operating-rooms were filled. I hope that that man is unmarried, for he no longer has a face. What a few hours before had been the honest countenance of an English lad was now a horrid welter of blood and splintered bone and mangled flesh.

The surgeon in charge took me upstairs to the ward which contained the more serious cases. On a cot beside the door was stretched a young Canadian. His face looked as though a giant in spiked shoes had stepped upon it. “Look,” said the surgeon, and lifted the woollen blanket. That man’s body was like a field which has been gone over with a disk harrow. His feet, his legs, his abdomen, his chest, his arms, his face were furrowed with gaping, angry wounds. “He was shot through the hand,” explained the surgeon. “He made his way back to the dressing-station in the reserve trenches, but just as he reached it a shell exploded at his feet.” I patted him on the shoulder and told him that I too knew the land of the great forests and the rolling prairies, and that before long he was going back to it. And, though he could not speak, he turned that poor, torn face of his and smiled at me. He must have been suffering the torments of the damned, but he smiled at me, I tell you—_he smiled at me_.

In the next bed, not two feet away—for the hospitals in Bailleul are very crowded—a great, brawny fellow from a Highland regiment was sitting propped against his pillows. He could not lie down, the surgeon told me, because he had been shot through the lungs. He held a tin cup in his hand, and quite regularly, about once a minute, he would hold it to his lips and spit out blood. Over by the window lay a boy with a face as white as the pillow-cover. He was quite conscious, and stared at the ceiling with wide, unseeing eyes. “Another shrapnel case,” remarked a hospital attendant. “Both legs amputated, but he’ll recover.” I wonder what he will do for a living when he gets back to England. Perhaps he will sell pencils or boot-laces on the flags of Piccadilly, and hold out his cap for coppers. A man with his head all swathed in strips of linen lay so motionless that I asked if he was living. “A head wound,” was the answer. “We’ve tried trepanning, and he’ll probably pull through, but he’ll never recover his reason.” Can’t you see him in the years to come, this splendid specimen of manhood, his mind a blank, wandering, helpless as a little child, about some English village?

I doubt if any four walls in all the world contain more human suffering than those of Hospital Number Eight at Bailleul, yet of all those shattered, broken, mangled men I heard only one utter a complaint or groan. He was a fair-haired giant, as are so many of these English fighting men. A bullet had splintered his spine and, with his hours numbered, he was suffering the most awful torment that a human being can endure. The sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. The muscles of his neck and arms were so corded and knotted that it seemed as though they were about to burst their way through the sun-tanned skin. His naked breast rose and fell in great sobs of agony. “Oh God! Oh God!” he moaned, “be merciful and take me—it hurts, it hurts—_it hurts me so_—my wife—the kiddies—for the love of Christ, doctor, give me a hypodermic and stop the pain—say good-by to them for me—tell them—oh, I _can’t_ stand it any longer—I’m not afraid to die, doctor, but I just can’t stand this pain—oh God, dear God, _won’t you please let me die_?”

When I went out of that room the beads of sweat were standing on _my_ forehead.

[Illustration:

“Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded and still they came streaming in.” ]

They took me down-stairs to show me what they call the “evacuation ward.” It is a big, barn-like room, perhaps a hundred feet long by fifty wide, and the floor was so thickly covered with blanketed forms on stretchers that there was no room to walk about among them. These were the men whose wounds had been treated, and who, it was believed, were able to survive the journey by hospital train to one of the base hospitals on the coast. It is a very grave case indeed that is permitted to remain for even a single night in the hospitals in Bailleul, for Bailleul is but a clearinghouse for the mangled, and its hospitals must always be ready to receive that unceasing scarlet stream which, day and night, night and day, comes pouring in, pouring in, pouring in.

[Illustration:

_From a photograph by Meurisse._

“The paths of glory lead——” ]

Those of the wounded in the evacuation ward who were conscious were for the most part cheerful—as cheerful, that is, as men can be whose bodies have been ripped and drilled and torn by shot and shell, who have been strangled by poisonous gases, who are aflame with fever, who are faint with loss of blood, and who have before them a railway journey of many hours. This railway journey to the coast is as comfortable as human ingenuity can make it, the trains with their white enamelled interiors and swinging berths being literally hospitals on wheels, but to these weakened, wearied men it is a terribly trying experience, even though they know that at the end of it clean beds and cool pillows and soft-footed, low-voiced nurses await them.

The men awaiting transfer still wore the clothes in which they had been carried from the trenches, though in many cases they had been slashed open so that the surgeons might get at the wounds. They were plastered with mud. Many of them had had no opportunity to bathe for weeks and were crawling with vermin. Their underclothes were in such loathsome condition that when they were removed they fell apart. The canvas stretchers on which they lay so patiently and uncomplainingly were splotched with what looked like wet brown paint, and on this horrid sticky substance were swarms of hungry flies. The air was heavy with the mingled smells of antiseptics, perspiration, and fresh blood. In that room was to be found every form of wound which can be inflicted by the most hellish weapons the brain of man has been able to devise. The wounded were covered with coarse woollen blankets, but some of the men in their torment had kicked their coverings off, and I saw things which I have no words to tell about and which I wish with all my heart that I could forget. There were men whose legs had been amputated up to the thighs; whose arms had been cut off at the shoulder; there were men who had lost their eyesight and all their days must grope in darkness; and there were other men who had been ripped open from waist to neck so that they looked like the carcasses that hang in front of butcher-shops; while most horrible of all were those who, without a wound on them, raved and cackled with insane mirth at the horror of the things that they had seen.

We went out from that place of unforgettable horrors into the sunlight and the clean fresh air again. It was late afternoon, the birds were singing, a gentle breeze was whispering in the tree-tops; but from over there, on the other side of that green and smiling valley, still came the unceasing clatter of that grim harvester garnering its crop of death. On the ground, in the shade of a spreading chestnut-tree, had been laid a stretcher, and on it was still another of those silent, bandaged forms. “He is badly wounded,” said the surgeon, following the direction of my glance, “fairly shot to pieces. But he begged us to leave him in the open air. We are sending him on by train to Boulogne to-night, and then by hospital ship to England.” I walked over and looked down at him. He could not have been more than eighteen—just such a clean-limbed, open-faced lad as any girl would have been proud to call sweetheart, any mother son. He was lying very still. About his face there was a peculiar grayish pallor, and on his half-parted lips had gathered many flies. I beckoned to the doctor. “He’s not going to England,” I whispered; “he’s going to sleep in France.” The surgeon, after a quick glance, gave an order, and two bearers came and lifted the stretcher, and bore it to a ramshackle outhouse which they call the mortuary, and gently set it down at the end of a long row of other silent forms.

As I passed out through the gateway in the wall which surrounds Hospital Number Eight, I saw a group of children playing in the street. “Come on,” shrilled one of them, “let’s play soldier!”

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BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.