“It was awful beyond anything imaginable,” she tells you gravely. “The worst thing that can happen to a doctor had come—to be in the midst of suffering and not to be able to lift a finger to help. All that we could do was to give them water to drink. We could feel our way to the water-pitchers. The rest of the time we could only sit, helpless, listen to the shells and to the wounded men groaning, and wait for dawn.”
Yes, it is a small, delicately fashioned woman, like you, like me, who lived through those days and those nights, and came through them morally and physically intact, into an even greater usefulness. It will not be a bad thing to remember her the next time we feel “tired” in our ordinary round of small efforts.
On the next day came the order to evacuate the hospital, bitter proof of the German success. Dr. Girard-Mangin began sending off her sick men in relays of four in the only ambulance at her disposal. They were taken down to the nearest little branch railroad, there put on the train, and sent—nobody knew where, anywhere out of the range of German guns.
All day Thursday the evacuation went on. By Thursday evening there were left only nine men in her ward, men practically dying, far gone with intestinal hemorrhages, too ill to move. Dr. Girard-Mangin spent another black night beside her dying men, moving from one to another in the intense obscurity, raising her voice above the thunder of the artillery to comfort them, to give them what small help she could without a light. On Friday all the hospital staff, with a few exceptions, was to leave. The hospital buildings and equipment were to be left in the charge of a non-com and two privates; and the men too ill to transport were to be left with one doctor and two aides. The rule in the French Sanitary Service for that case is that the youngest doctor stays with the sick. Dr. Girard-Mangin was the youngest doctor.
But at this, the good head-doctor, who had daughters of his own in Paris, cried out that there was a limit, that he would never forgive any man who left a daughter of his alone in such a position, alone with dying men, alone under fire, alone to face the Boches. No, no Frenchman could be expected to do that.
Dr. Girard-Mangin appealed over his head to the military authority in command, for permission to do her duty as it fell to her. “I have not failed in my services so far. It is not just to force me to fail now.”
The military ruling was that the usual rule would hold. The little woman doctor stayed in danger, and the men went back to the rear. The parting was a moving one; those comrades of hers who had seen her working by their sides for so many months took her in their arms and wept openly as they bade her good-by.
If you venture to ask her what were her own emotions at this moment, she tells you with a shudder, “Oh, sorrow, black, black sorrow for France. We all thought, you know, that Verdun had fallen, that the Germans had pierced the line. No one knew how far they had gone. It was an awful moment.” Apparently she did not think of herself at all.
All day Friday, she was there with her stricken men and with two aides. Friday night she lay beside them in the dark. On Saturday the man left in charge of the hospital buildings went mad from the nervous tension—they expected almost from hour to hour to see the Germans appear—and from the hellish noise of the artillery.
I find myself cold as I try to think what another black night meant in those conditions. Dr. Girard-Mangin passed it and emerged into another dawn.