No one dreamed of war, but if the very day and hour had been known for years, Dr. Girard-Mangin could hardly have prepared herself more completely for the ordeal. Unconsciously she had “trained” for it, as the runner trains for his race. She was not very strong, slightly built, with some serious constitutional weakening, but she filled every day full to the brim with exacting and fatiguing work. She had two great factors in her favor. One of them was that enviable gift which Nature gives occasionally to remarkable people, the capacity to live with very little sleep. The other is even more noteworthy in a doctor—in whom close acquaintance with the laws of health seems often to breed contempt.
Dr. Girard-Mangin is that rare bird, a doctor who believes profoundly, seriously, in the advice which she gives to others, in the importance of those simple, humdrum laws of daily health which only very extraordinary people have the strength of mind to obey. Never, never, she says, as though it were a matter of course, has she allowed fatigue, or overoccupation, or inertia, or boredom to interfere with her early morning deep-breathing and physical exercises, and her tonic cold bath. Never, never, no matter how long or exhausting the day, has she rolled into bed, dead beat, too tired to go through the simple processes of the toilet, which make sleep so much more refreshing. No matter how absorbed in her work, she has always taken the time at regular intervals to relax, to chat sociably with quite ordinary people, to go to the theater, to hear music. She has always breakfasted and lunched with her little boy, has steered him through his spelling and arithmetic, has gone on walks with him, has been his comrade and “pal.” This has been as good for her as for him, naturally. Every summer she has had the courageous good sense to take a vacation in the country. In short, she is a doctor who takes to her own heart the advice about rational life which doctors so often reserve for their patients.
To this woman, tempered to a steel-like strength by self-imposed discipline and by a regular, well-ordered life, came the great summons. And it found her ready to the last nerve in her strong, delicate little hand. You have read, probably, how on that “Day of Doom” when France called out her men, a concierge received, among mobilization papers for all the men in the big apartment house, one sending Dr. Girard-Mangin (presumably also a man, by the name) out to a military hospital in the Vosges mountains. The notice of mobilization was handed to a woman, a patriotic woman who long ago had heard the call to fight for France’s best interests. She had seen her brother go before her into the fighting ranks and she followed him, into danger and service. She said a quick good-by to her friends, to her parents, to her son, her only child, a fine boy of fourteen then, from whom she had never before been separated.
Will every mother who reads these lines stop here and think what this means?
There is no need to repeat in detail here what has already been told of the first three months of her service—her arrival at the field hospital, disorganized, submerged by the terrible, ever-renewed flood of wounded men, of the astonishment of the doctor in charge. “What, a woman! This is no place for a woman. But, good God! if you know anything about surgery, roll up your sleeves and stay!”
There she stayed for three months, those blasting first three months of the war, when French people put forth undreamed-of strength to meet a crisis of undreamed-of horror. Out there in that distant military hospital, toiling incessantly in great heat, with insufficient supplies, bearing the mental and moral shock of the first encounter with the incredible miseries of war, that modern, highly organized woman, separated for the first time from her family, from her child, fearing everything for them and for her country, had no word, no tidings whatever, till the 28th of August. Then no knowledge of her son, of her parents, only a notice that the Government had retreated from Paris to Bordeaux! Comforting news that, for the first! Next they knew that Rheims was taken. Then one of the men whose wounds she dressed told her that he had been able to see the Eiffel Tower from where he fell. This sounded as though the next news could be nothing but the German entry into Paris.
All France throbbed with straining, despairing effort, far beyond its normal strength, during those first three months; and to do the man’s part she took, the delicate woman doctor, laboring incessantly among the bleeding wrecks of human bodies, needed all her will-power to pull her through.
Then the wild period of fury and haste and nervous, emotional exaltation passed, and France faced another ordeal, harder for her temperament even than the first fierce onset of the unequal struggle—the long period of patient endurance of the unendurable. The miracle of the Marne had been wrought; Paris was saved; the sting and stimulant of immediate, deadly danger was past; the fatigue from the supernatural effort of those first months dimmed every eye, deadened all nerves. Then France tapped another reservoir of national strength and began patiently, constructively to “organize” the war. And that daughter of France bent her energies to help in this need, as in the first.
A rough rearrangement of competences was attempted everywhere on the front. Dentists no longer dug trenches, bakers were set to baking instead of currying horses, and expert telegraphers stopped making ineffectual efforts to cook. It came out then that the real specialty of the valiant little woman doctor who had been doing such fine work in the operating-room was not surgery at all. “I’m no surgeon, you know!” she says, and leaves it to her friends to tell you of the extraordinary record of her efficiency in that field, the low percentage of losses in her surgical cases. If you mention this, she says, “Ah, that’s just because I’m not a born surgeon. I have to take very special care of my cases to be equal to the job.” It was discovered that her great specialty was contagious diseases. There was great need for a specialist of that sort out at Verdun, where, alas! a typhoid epidemic had broken out. This was before the extra precautions about inoculations, which were taken later.
Dr. Girard-Mangin was sent to Verdun on November 1st, 1914, and was there steadily for more than a year, until the 28th of February, 1916. She found her sick men on mattresses, in tents, on such low ground that they were often literally in water. Whenever there was freezing weather, those who cared for them slid about on sheets of ice. Above them, on higher ground, were some rough old barracks, empty, partly remodeled, said to have been left there by the Prussians in 1871. “Why don’t we move the sick up there?” she asked, and was met by all the usual dragging, clogging reasons given by administrative inertia.