But we have not come to that terrific epic, as yet. Before that second tornado burst over the heads of the French and of our woman doctor, there was a long, hard, dull period of four hundred and seventy days of continuous service—for Dr. Girard-Mangin, being a pioneer woman, felt in honor bound to do more than a man would do. In the three years and more of her war service, she has had just three weeks’ furlough, seven days out of every year to see her son, to see her family, to relax. Every other day of that long procession of days, she has been on duty, active, and, as befits a woman, constructively active.
She did not continue resignedly to struggle with tin-can drinking-cups, and one bathtub for two hundred men. Neither did she rely on the proverbially slow mills of the Government to grind her out the necessary supplies. She was not only the army doctor in charge of the contagious cases in the big sanitary section and hospital near Verdun, she was also a figure of international importance, the Présidente of the Hygiene Department of the Conseil International des Femmes—her predecessor had been Lady Aberdeen; she was high in honor at the big Beaujon Hospital in Paris; she was well-known to the charitable world in the Society for Hygienic Lodgings for the poor, which owed so much to her; and she had a wide circle of friends everywhere. The little aide major sent out from her bare shed-hospital, lacking in everything, a clarion call for help for her sick men. With years of experience in organization back of her, she set to work and, in the midst of the fury of destruction all about her, built up, item by item, a little corner of order and competent activity. In November, 1914, there was nothing but a windswept shed, with straw pallets and tin-can utensils. By June of the next year you would have found, if you had had the courage to go within two kilometers of the front line, a very well-appointed contagious ward of a military hospital, where nothing was lacking for the men’s comfort—except a certainty that the whole thing might not be blown to pieces by a shell. And by the end of 1915, when there began to be talk of a great German drive against Verdun, the men under our doctor’s supervision had as good care as they could have had anywhere, with laboratory and sterilizing facilities—everything. Dr. Girard-Mangin knew what was the best to be had in hospitals and she did not rest until somehow, Aladdin-like, she had made it to blossom, out there in danger and desolation.
All during January of 1916 there was terrific tension along that front. The monster German offensive against Verdun was in the air. The month of January passed with desperate slowness, such intent, apprehensive suspense being torturing for human nerves, especially tired human nerves which had already been through a long, severe period of trial.
Everybody showed signs of nervousness. Our little doctor stuck faithfully to her bedrock principles of health, changed her shoes and stockings every day, took her Spartan baths and rub-downs in her colder-than-freezing water, went through her deep-breathing and her setting-up exercises every morning. By such merely feminine reliance on everyday sanity in life, she kept herself in excellent physical shape, and did not succumb to the temptation, which is too much for so many doctors under strain, of hypodermics of strychnin, and other stimulants.
February 1st came. The great storm, looming murkily, had not burst.
February inched itself along, and finally, because human nature can only stand about so much of strain, nerves began to relax in utter fatigue.
On February 21st, which was a Monday, it was fairly clear, cold, with what passes for sunshine in that region. Dr. Girard-Mangin stepped out in front of her shed-hospital ward, after lunch, and made this remark to herself: “I don’t believe the Boches are going to pull off that offensive at all. And to-day is almost sunny. I have a good notion to go over to the 165th and get my hair washed.” There was an ex-coiffeur in that regiment who kept on with his trade in his leisure moments.
As this singularly peace-time thought passed through her mind, an obus screamed its way loudly over her head. “That’s near,” she thought, “nearer than they generally are.”
Before she could get back into the hospital, the battle of Verdun had begun.
The blow was delivered with astounding rapidity, and with stunning force. Up to that time, nothing had ever been conceived like the violence of the artillery fire. There in the hospital, only two kilometers back of the front, the noise was so great they could scarcely hear each other’s voices. Upon those men, and that woman, unnerved by six weeks of nerve-racking suspense, the great crisis leaped with murderous fury. It was as though the world were being battered to pieces about their heads. Each one called up in himself all the reserve strength his life had given him and, tight-lipped, clung as best he could to self-control.