On Sunday morning the General in command of that region, amazed to find that any one was still there, sent peremptory orders that the premises must be evacuated entirely, dying men and all. They would certainly be killed if they were kept there. And more, there was no longer anything to give them to eat. This was a military order and so overrode the rulings of the Sanitary Service. Dr. Girard-Mangin prepared to evacuate. She had at her disposition a small camion in which she put the four men best able to be carried, and her own ambulance in which she packed the five worst cases, crosswise of the vehicle. To try to give them some security against the inevitable jolting, she bound them tightly over and over to their stretchers. Then, with her little medicine-kit, she got in beside them and told her chauffeur to take them to Clermont-en-Argonne, and not by the safer route taken by the ravitaillement convoys, because her sick men could never live through the length of that trip, but by the shorter road, leading along directly back of the front.
“I wonder that he was willing to take that dangerous route,” you say.
“I didn’t ask his opinion about it,” says Dr. Girard-Mangin with a ring of iron in her voice.
So began a wild ride of forty-three kilometers, constantly under fire, with five men at the point of death. The chauffeur dodged between the bursting shells, the woman in the car watched her sick men closely and kept them up with hypodermics of stimulants—which are not administered by a shaking hand!
You ask respectfully, looking at the white scar on her cheek, “It was then, during that ride, that you were wounded, wasn’t it?”
She nods, hastily, indifferently, and says, “And when we finally reached Clermont-en-Argonne, my sick men were no better off, for I found the hospital absolutely swamped with wounded. I said I was there with five mortally sick men from Verdun, and they answered, ‘If they were all Generals we could not take them in. You are mad, Madame, to bring sick men here.’ So we went on ten kilometers further to a little village called Froidos, where my face-wound was dressed and where finally I was able to leave my men, all alive still, in good hands.”
“They didn’t live to get well, did they?” you ask.
At this question, she has a moment of stupefaction before the picture of your total incomprehension of what she has been talking about; she has a moment’s retrospective stare back into that seething caldron which was the battle of Verdun; she opens her mouth to cry out on your lack of imagination; and she ends by saying quietly, almost with pity for your ignorance, “Oh, I never saw or heard of those men again. There was a great deal too much else to be done at that time.”
Have you lost track of time and place in that adventure of hers? It is not surprising. She was then in the little village of Froidos, on the afternoon of Sunday, February 27th, almost exactly a week after the battle began—and after almost exactly a week of unbelievable horror—after four nights spent without a light in a great hospital full of wounded men—after a ride of nearly fifty kilometers constantly under fire, with mortally sick men. And she now turned, like a good soldier who has accomplished the task set him, to report at headquarters for another.
Her headquarters, the Direction du Service Sanitaire was at Bar-le-Duc. Without a moment’s rest or delay, she set out for Bar-le-Duc, she and her chauffeur, half-blind with lack of sleep. They arrived there at midnight. She reported herself at the hospital, so large that in normal times it holds three thousand wounded. “I have just brought in the last of the sick from the military hospital at Verdun,” she said, to explain her presence. They were astounded to hear that any one had been there so lately. Every one had thought that certainly the Germans were there by that time.