“I’m your officer,” she said, and went away to telephone to the military authority in charge of such cases.
“I can’t be expected to have discipline if I’m not backed up,” she said. “This is a test case. It’s now or never.”
The answer was a non-com and a guard marching up to the barracks, saluting the military doctor, and, with all due military ceremony, carrying off the offender for a week in prison. Dr. Girard-Mangin laughs still at the recollection of the consternation among the nineteen who were left. “I never had any trouble about discipline, after that,” she says. “Of course there were the utter incompetents to be weeded out. For that I followed the time-honored army custom of sending my worst man whenever the demand from Headquarters came for a good, competent person to be sent to other work! Before long I had reduced the force of nurses to twelve. Those twelve I kept for all the time of my service there, and we parted at the end old friends and tried comrades. I have never lost track of them since. They always write me once in a while, wherever they are.”
As soon as it grew dark enough, that first night, for the ambulances to dash out through the blackness, over the shell-riddled roads to the abris, close to the front, the stricken men began to come in. Before dawn, that very first night, there were fifty-five terrible typhoid cases brought into the bare sheds. Then it was that Dr. Girard-Mangin, working single-handed with her score of crude, untrained helpers, needed all her capacity for going without sleep. Then it was that her men, seeing her at work, stopped laughing because she was a woman and admired her because she was a woman doing wonderful things; then, best of all, forgot that she was a woman, and took her simply for the matchless leader that she is, in the battle against disease. I think it was not wholly the guard, marching away the disobedient man to prison, who was responsible for the fact that our little woman doctor had no further difficulty with discipline.
The condition of the typhoid patients was harrowing beyond words. A man going out with his squad to a front-line trench would be stricken down with fever on arriving. It was impossible for him to return until his squad was relieved and he could be carried to the rear on a comrade’s back. There he was, there he must remain, for the three or four or five days of his squad’s “turn” in the front lines. Can you imagine the condition of a man with typhoid fever, who has lain in a trench in the mud for four days, with no shelter from the rain or snow but an overcoat spread over him, with no care beyond an occasional drink of water from a comrade’s flask? For your own sake I hope you can not imagine it. And I will not go into details. Enough to say that such men were brought in by the tens, by the twenties, by the fifties, filthy beyond words, at the limit of exhaustion, out of their heads with weakness and fever and horror.
And there to stem that black tide of human misery stands this little upright, active, valiant, twentieth-century woman. I think, although we are not of her nation, we may well be proud of her as a fellow-being who had voluntarily renounced ease to choose the life which had made her fit to cope with the crisis of that night—and of the more than four hundred days and nights following. For cope with it she did, competently, resolutely, successfully. “Oh yes, we gave them cold baths,” she says, when you ask for details. “We managed somehow. They had all the right treatment, cold baths, wet packs, injections, the right food—everything very primitive at first, of course, but everything you ever do for typhoid anywhere. Our percentage of losses was very low always.”
“But how? How? How did you manage?” you ask.
“Oh, at the beginning everything was very rough. We had only one portable galvanized-iron bathtub. Since they were all so badly infected, there was less danger in bathing them all in the same tub than in not fighting the fever that way. And then, just as soon as I could reach the outside world by letter, I clamored for more, and they were sent.”
“But how could you, single-handed, give cold baths to so many men? It’s a difficult matter, giving a cold bath to a typhoid patient.”
“I wasn’t single-handed. I had my twelve soldier-nurses.”