The first nerves to give way were in the bakeshop. The bakers suddenly burst out of their overheated cell and, half-naked in that sharp cold, clad only in their white-linen aprons and trousers, fled away, anywhere, away, out of that hell. One of the doctors, seeing this beginning of the panic, shouted out in an angry attempt to stem the tide of fear, “Shame on you, men! What are you doing! What would happen if every one ran away!”
One of the fleeing bakers, dodging with agility the outstretched restraining arms, called out heartily, with a strong Southern accent, “Right you are, doctor, perfectly right!” and continued to run faster than ever. Which typically Midi phrase and action was seized upon by those gallant French hearts for the laugh which is the Gallic coquetry in the face of danger.
But even they could not smile at what they next saw. At four o’clock that afternoon began the spectacle, awful to French eyes, of regiments of chasseurs fleeing toward the rear.
“So inconceivable was this to me, that I repeated, ‘Chasseurs! Retreating!’”
Dr. Girard-Mangin closed her eyes a moment as if she saw them again. “Oh, yes, retreating—and no wonder! All their equipment gone, no guns, no ammunition, no grenades, no bayonets—their bare fists, and those bleeding, for weapons. Many of them were naked, yes, literally naked, except for their leather cartridge belts. Everything made of cloth had been blown from their bodies by the air-pressure from exploding shells. Many of them were horribly wounded, although they were staggering along. I remember one man, whose wounds we dressed, who came reeling up to the hospital, holding his hand to his face, and when he took his hand down most of his face came with it. Oh, yes, they were retreating, those who had enough life left to walk. And they told us that Verdun was lost, that no human power could resist that thrust.”
All that night, and all the next day and all the next night, such men poured through and past the hospital and during all that time there was no cessation in the intolerable, maddening din of the artillery. When you ask Dr. Girard-Mangin how she lived through those days and nights, she tells you steadily, “Oh, that was not the worst. We could still work. And we did. More than eighteen thousand wounded passed through the hospital that week. We had too much to do to think of anything else. It seemed as though all the men in the world were wounded and pouring in on us.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the tide of men changed in character somewhat, and this meant that the end was near. In place of chasseurs and the ordinary poilus, quantities of brown Moroccans, those who fight at the very front, came fleeing back, horribly wounded, most of them, yelling wild prayers to Allah, clutching at themselves like children and howling like wild beasts—impossible to understand or to make understand. And yet, somehow, the hospital staff, staggering with fatigue themselves, ministered to them, too, until—this was where they all touched bottom—until, on Wednesday night, the electricity suddenly gave out and, in the twinkling of an eye, blackness fell on the great wards, shaken by the incessant infernal screaming rush of the shells overhead, by the thunder of the cannon, and filled with the shrieks of the agonizing wild men from Africa. Blackness like the end of the world.
Messengers were sent hastily to grope their way down to the nearest village for candles. But they returned empty-handed. Long before that the soldiers had carried off all the supply of candles.
“What did you do, all that night?”
Dr. Girard-Mangin makes no light pretense of belittling the experience.