CHAPTER VI.
THE MEDICAL SERVICES.
The magic-workers of the war—Fighting the Germans—Concerning the Victorian primness of conversation and the present popularity of "v.d." as a theme for small talk—The Army and "v.d."—The etiquette of hospitals and the ways of matrons—The war against Trench Feet—Mustard gas in 1918.
Probably more than half the men at G.H.Q. had been "crocked" at one time or another during the campaign, from wounds or one of those fevers of the battlefield born of mud and filth and fatigue. Some came to work on the Staff whilst still under medical treatment, and there was a local hospital at Montreuil which was a boon to those out-patients needing massage for their scars or quinine for their fevers.
Apart from the doctors of this hospital only the very big men of the medical services appeared ever at G.H.Q. It was a pleasure not easily won to persuade them to talk over their work. But when they did talk, what wonders they had to tell of!
A BY-WAY
Socrates in prison, when the fetters were taken off his legs, as he rubbed them to make the blood run freely again, speculated on how pleasure always followed pain, so that the two seemed to be linked together by some unbreakable bond. One would like to hear Socrates to-day, as his limb, injured in Flanders, was rubbed back to usefulness, talking to his masseur on the good that will follow the evil of the Great War as surely as if the two had been linked together and one was the consequence of the other. Matter for a fine homily there from the stubborn old hero with the divinely clear mind!
Those optimists who thought that a new heaven and a new earth would come at the end of the war, and that even all politicians would become sincere, alert, and vigorous in the public service, were perhaps not reasonable and may be disappointed in some measure; but no one can observe closely the phenomena of the war without being sure that from its sacrifices and lessons much good will come. The dreadful fire that had to be kindled to burn out the cancer of Germanism burned out evil too in the nations that were the instruments of vengeance. Peoples who went into war iron will come out steel ultimately; for the war, as well as being preservative, will prove regenerative.