Left alone on duty one night, a surgeon wished to talk to a wounded French officer and was obliged to ask for the assistance as interpreter of a nurse who had a reputation as a linguist.
‘Ask him,’ said the surgeon, ‘if he has a pain in his stomach.’
The nurse bent over the bed and put the question:
‘Monsieur, avez-vous du pain dans l’estomac?’
The poor man had been shot through the body and was on a water diet. He indignantly repudiated the suggestion, assuring her that he had only taken what the surgeon had ordered for him and that under no circumstances would he do otherwise.
Both French and British officers were acutely shocked by the horrors through which they had passed, and most of them suffered from a painful reaction when the strain was relaxed. At first they could not rest in hospital, and their nights were haunted by terrible memories and anxious thoughts. One of them never told what he had seen, but night after night he covered his face with his uninjured hand and moaned:
‘The children. Oh! the children!’
He had left children of his own at home; and the sufferings of the little Belgians gave him no rest.
Older men were harassed and worn by anxiety, and distressed by the difficulty and precarious position of the allied Armies. The younger ones spoke of how ‘the British were hanging on with their eyelids’; or how the French were supposed to be ‘making a flank attack and were lost.’ Some in their depression feared defeat; others broke down with exhaustion and reaction.
To all of them, officers and men alike, hospital was a haven of peace and security. It was heavenly to lie in clean beds, to be cared for by Englishwomen, to be rid of regimental discipline and for the moment of responsibility too. The severity of their wounds, the operations, the pain were minor matters; for the time being they had found comfort and rest. Probably none of them had been in contact with women doctors before; but that did not make any difference. They trusted the women as they would have trusted men—passing the bullets which had been extracted from their persons from bed to bed and pronouncing the surgeon to be ‘wonderfully clever!’ The more convalescent patients visited the men who had undergone serious operations in the wards and cheered them with reminders that they were not ‘in the hands of the R.A.M.C.’ Their enthusiasm for the hospital was delightful and encouraging. When they got well and went away, it was like seeing boys go back to school.