There came a rush of men out of the trench to our rescue and they carried us both into its protection. They pushed a cigarette between my lips, the first thing that’s always done for a wounded comrade in the trenches, but I was too weak and sick to want that small, immediate comfort. The cigarette hung on my wounded lips. I tried to thank them, but could say nothing. I was making a desperate fight to hold on to consciousness.
CHAPTER XIX
Blighty
My body was battered, half-frozen, gone altogether helpless, but I am grateful that my mind remained faithful to its task. In fact, it seemed to scorn the state of my body and was extraordinarily clear and acute. Every fact, impression, knowledge of any sort that I had obtained on my venture into the German position arrayed itself neatly and precisely in my thoughts. The Canadians wanted to rush me off immediately on a stretcher, but after the refreshment of a drink of water, I felt quite able to complete my work by reporting to the proper officers the information I had gained. Two were soon at my side, racing through a communicating trench from their dug-out.
I indicated to them an inside pocket of my tunic where were the maps I had made roughly in the darkness, but which I knew would be significant to them. My broken and shattered jaw made talking something of an agony, but I was able to bear it and mumble what additional knowledge I had to yield.
These fellow officers were extravagant in praise of my adventure and almost embarrassed me by their solicitude, insisting on lifting me with their own hands into the stretcher that had been brought and on walking beside it to the entrance of the hospital which was on the third trench line. It was no easy task for the stretcher bearers. To reach this hospital they had to descend long, rude, tortuous stairways. The hospital room was one hundred feet underground. Its only illumination was by candlelight and you got the impression of mystery and tragedy. In the dim glow the white-robed doctors and gray-robed nurses moved noiselessly on a tanbark-covered floor. Their noiselessness made all the more distinct sharp moans from my fellow wounded. There were not cots enough for all. Some had been laid on pallets of straw.
Three men were terribly wounded. One had both legs off. The chest and shoulders of another had been torn raw and half his chin smashed away. My restless eyes saw the face of another the orderlies were just bandaging. His eyes had been ripped out.
Some months before I had heard an anecdote of a poilu who had lost both hands. And when a sympathetic French woman would have commiserated him for this dire misfortune, he unconsciously by old habit and therefore none the less pitifully raised the stumps to make a true Gallic gesture with hands that were not there, and he said to her:
“Madam, it is right that you should pity me. My friend, Anatole, gave his life. I was but privileged to give my hands for France.”