"And they thought we wouldn't fight"

by Floyd Phillips Gibbons

We had various ways of expressing or suppressing the pain. You who have had a particularly vicious mustard plaster jerked off that tender spot in the back, right between the shoulders, have some small conception of the delicate sensation that accompanies the removal of old gauze from a healing wound.

Some of the men would grit their teeth and grunt, others would put their wrists in their mouths and bite themselves during the operation. Some others would try to keep talking to the doctor or the nurse while the ordeal was in progress and others would just simply shout. There was little satisfaction to be gained from these expressions of pain because while one man was yelling the other thirteen in the ward were shouting with glee and chaffing him, and as soon as his wounds had been redressed he would join in the laughs at the expense of those who followed him.

There was a Jewish boy in the ward and he had a particularly painful shell wound in his right leg. He was plucky about the painful treatment and used to say to the doctor, "Don't mind me yelling, doc. I can't help it, but you just keep right on."

The Jew boy's cry of pain as near as I can reproduce it went something like this, "Oy! Oy!! Oy!!! YOY!!! Doctor!"

The Jew boy's clear-toned enunciation of this Yiddish lullaby, as the rest of the ward called it, brought many a heartless, fiendish laugh from the occupants of the other beds. We almost lost one of our patients on account of that laugh. He nearly laughed himself to death—in fact.

This near victim of uncontrollable risibilities was an Italian boy from the East Side of New York. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated one of his lungs and pleurisy had developed in the other one. It had become necessary to operate on one of the lungs and tape it down. The boy had to do his best to breathe with one lung that was affected by pleurisy. Every breath was like the stab of a knife and it was quite natural that the patient would be peevish and garrulous. The whole ward called him the "dying Wop." But his name was Frank.

When the Jew boy would run the scale with his torture cry, the "dying Wop" would be forced to forget his laboured breathing and give vent to laughter. These almost fatal laughs sounded something like this:

"He! Hee!! Hee!!! (on a rising inflection and then much softer) Oh, Oh, Oh! Stop him, stop him, stop him!" The "He-Hee's" were laughs, but the "Oh-oh's" were excruciating pain.

Frank grew steadily worse and had to be removed from the ward. Weeks afterward I went back to see him and found him much thinner and considerably weaker. He occupied a bed on one of the pavilions in the garden. He was still breathing out of that one lung and between gasps he told me that six men had died in the bed next to him. Then he smiled up at me with a look in his eyes that seemed to say, "But they haven't croaked the 'dying Wop' yet."

"This here—hospital stuff——" Frank told me slowly, and between gasps, "is the big fight after all. I know—I am fighting here—against death—and am going to win out, too.