Delayed by this, it was nearly midnight when they drew near their destination. The chauffeur turned off the main road into a smaller one, a short cut to the hospital, and sank at once in mud up to his hubs. From twelve o’clock that night till half-past five in the morning, they labored to make the few kilometers which separated them from Vadelaincourt. Once the chauffeur, hearing in the dark the rush of water against the car, announced that he was sure that the river had burst its banks, that they had missed the bridge and were now in the main current. Dr. Girard-Mangin got down to investigate and found herself knee-deep in mud so liquid that its sound had deceived the chauffeur. They toiled on, the nurses inside the car wringing their hands.
By the time it was faintly dawn they arrived at the hospital, where the hard-worked head-doctor, distracted with the rush of wounded, cried out upon her for being a woman, but told her for Heaven’s sake to stay and help. The nurses were taken in and set to work, where at once they forgot themselves and their fears. But again there was no place for the new doctor to sleep, the hospital being overflowing with human wreckage. She did what all ambulance people hate to do, she went back to the reeking ambulance, laid herself on a stretcher, wet boots and all, drew up about her the typhoid-soaked blankets of her ex-patients, and instantly fell asleep. The chauffeur had the preferable place of sleeping under the car, on another stretcher.
She had no more than closed her eyes, when came a loud, imperious pounding on the car, “Get up quickly. The médecin-en-chef sends for you at once; terrible lot of wounded just brought in; every hand needed.”
She went back through the mud to the hospital, had a cup of hot coffee and—detail eloquent of the confusion and disorganization of that feverish week—some plum-cake! By what freak of ravitaillement there was only plum-cake, she never knew.
Then she put on her operating-apron and cap. She went into the operating-room at half-past seven in the morning. She operated steadily, without stopping, for more than five hours. At one o’clock she felt giddy and her legs failed her. She sat down flat on the floor, leaning back against the wall. “Here it comes!” she said to herself, fighting the faintness which dissolved all her members, “Here comes womanishness!”
But it did not come. She sat thus, setting her teeth and tightening her will until she conquered it. A new relay of doctors came in. She staggered off, had more coffee, a piece of chocolate and another piece of plum-cake! And was told that she would be “off duty” till eight that evening. Where could she go to rest? Nowhere. Snow lay on the fields, mud was deep in the roads. There was not a bed empty.
“I sat down in a corner, in a chair, quite a comfortable chair,” she tells you, “and took down my hair and brushed and braided it. You know how much that rests you!”
Now, Dr. Girard-Mangin is the last person in the world over whom to sentimentalize, and I swore before beginning to write about her that I would try not to do it. But I can not restrain myself from asking you here if you do not feel with me like both laughing and crying at the inimitable, homely femininity of that familiar gesture, at the picture of that shining little warrior-figure, returning in that abomination of desolation to the simple action of a sheltered woman’s everyday home life?
Then she went to sleep, there in the “quite comfortable” chair, with her shoes unlaced but still on her feet. “I had lost my other pair somewhere along the route,” she explains, “and I didn’t dare to take those off because I knew I could never get them on again if I did.”
There followed twenty days of this terrific routine, steady work in the operating-room with intervals of seven hours’ “rest,” with nowhere to go to rest. “But the food got better almost at once,” she says, in explanation of her having lived through it. “We couldn’t have gotten along on plum-cake, of course!”