For nine of those twenty days, she never took off her shoes at all, and the foot was frozen there which now she drags a little in walking.
On March 23rd, a month after the battle of Verdun had begun, the médecin-chef-inspecteur came to Vadelaincourt, went through the usual motions of stupefaction to find a woman doctor there, decided—rather late—that it was no place for a woman, and sent her to Châlons. For six months thereafter, she was in the Somme, near Ypres, working specially among the tubercular soldiers, but also taking her full share of military surgery. “Just the usual service at the front, nothing of special interest,” she says with military brevity, baffling your interest, and leaving you to find out from other sources that she was wounded again in June of that year.
On the 11th of October, 1916, a remarkable and noteworthy event took place. For once a Governmental action was taken with intelligence. The Government, wishing to institute a special course of training for military nurses at the front, called to its organization and direction, not somebody’s relation-in-law, not a politician’s protégée, but the woman in France best fitted to undertake the work. Such an action on the part of any Government is worthy of note!
The hospital which had been built for charitable purposes on the Rue Desnouettes was loaned to the Government. What was needed for its head was some one who knew all about what training was essential for nursing service at the front. Any good military doctor could have done this part. Also some one was needed who knew all about what is the life of a woman at the front. Any good nurse of military experience could have seen to this. Also there was needed a person with experience in organization, with the capacity to keep a big enterprise in smooth and regular running. Any good business man could have managed this. Furthermore there was needed a person with magnetism who could inspire the women passing through the school with enthusiasm, with ardor, with devotion— I needn’t go on, I think. You must have seen that only one person combined all these qualifications, and she is the one now at the head of the hospital-school.
Dr. Girard-Mangin received a call summoning her back to that “work at the rear” which is such a trial for those who have known the glory of direct service at the front.
This meant drudgery for her, long hours of attention to uninteresting but important details, work with a very mixed class of intelligences—the women in her courses of study vary from peasant girls to officers’ widows; bending her quick intelligence to cope with sloth and dullness. It meant, worst of all and hardest of all, living again in the midst of petty bickerings, little personal jealousies, mean ambitions. Nothing is more startling for those who “come back from the front” than to find the world at the rear still going on with its tiny quarrels and disputes, still industriously raking in its muck-heap. And nothing more eloquently paints our average, ordinary life than the intense moral depression which attends the return to it of those who have for a time escaped from it to a rougher, more dangerous, and more self-forgetful atmosphere.
For me, no part of Dr. Girard-Mangin’s usefulness is more dramatic than the undramatic phase of it in which she is now faithfully toiling. Her coolness under fire, her steadiness under overwhelming responsibilities, her astonishing physical endurance do not thrill me more than this prompt, disciplined ability to take up civilian life again and quiet, civilian duties.
She has organized the hospital ingeniously along original lines, as a perfect reproduction of what the nurses will encounter at the front: a series of barracks, a ward to each shed, with the nurse’s little sleeping-cubicle at the end with its rough but sufficient sanitary arrangements. Another unit is given over to the operating-room and its appendages, the sterilizing-room, anesthetic-room, etc. Another is the administrative building, and contains the offices of the médecin-en-chef, the head-nurse, the pharmacy, the bacteriological laboratory. At one side are very simple but wholesome sleeping quarters and study-rooms for the fifty and more nurses who pass through the school every three months. For Dr. Girard-Mangin only takes them in hand when they have already completed a course of training in ordinary hospitals. Even then she weeds out rigorously, in the middle of the short, intensive, concentrated course, those who do not show the necessary physical, mental, and moral qualities to fit them for the grave responsibilities they will have at the front, for nurses from this hospital go out to direct and run the field hospitals, not merely to be nurses there.
The work for the doctor at the head is a “grind,” nothing less, monotonous, like all teaching—an ever-reiterated repetition of the same thing—no glory, no change, no bright face of danger. The clear brown eyes face it as coolly, as undaunted, as they faced bursting shells, or maddened soldiers. The clear-thinking brain sees its vital importance to the country as well as it saw the more picturesque need for staying with sick men under fire. The well-tempered will keeps lassitude and fatigue at bay, keeps the whole highly strung, highly developed organism patiently, steadily, enduringly at work for France.
There, my fellow-citizens in America, there is a citizen to envy, to imitate!