But the work was not going on at all well. My absurd stretcher-bearers, unable to fall in with each other’s movements, stumbled like broken-kneed, miserable nags, causing the wounded to scream with pain. In a nibbling, haphazard sort of way, they tried to deal with the waiting masses of the injured, and the whole A.C.A. seemed to stamp with impatience. The effect was rather like a human meat factory which has its machinery going at full strength without being fed with oil and materials.
I must really describe the A.C.A. to you. In war slang it means an automatic hospital (“autochir”)—the latest thing in surgical invention. It’s the last word in science, just like our 400 m.m. calibre guns which run on metal rails: it follows the armies with motors, steam-driven machinery, microscopes, laboratories, the complete equipment of a modern hospital. It is the first great repair depôt which the wounded man enters on coming out of the destructive, grinding mill on the extreme front. Here are brought the parts of the military machine that are most spoiled. Skilled workmen take them in hand at once, loosen them quickly, and with a practised eye examine them, as one would a hydro-pneumatic break, an ignition chamber or a collimator. If the part is seriously damaged, it goes through the usual routine of being scrapped; but if the “human material” is not irretrievably ruined, it is patched up ready to be used again at the first opportunity, and that is called “preserving the effectives.”
My stretcher-bearers, with the jolting clumsiness of drunken dockers, were bringing to the A.C.A. a few of the injured, who were at once swallowed up and eliminated. And the factory continued to growl, like some Moloch whose appetite has been whetted by the fumes of the first sacrifice.
I had picked up a stretcher. Helped by a gunner who had been wounded in the neck, and whose only desire was to be of some use while awaiting his operation, I led my crew in amongst the heap of men that lay on the ground. It was then that I saw some one passing along wearing a high-grade officer’s hat—a sensible sort of man who smiled in spite of his solicitous bearing.
“There is something wrong with your ambulance work,” he said. “I’ll send you eight negroes. They are excellent stretcher men, these fellows from Madagascar.”
Ten minutes afterwards the negroes had come.
To be exact, they were not all natives of Madagascar: they were types selected from the 1st Colonial Corps which was at that very moment strenuously fighting before Laffaux. There were a few natives of the Soudan, whose age was difficult to tell, sombre and wrinkled, and concealing under their regimental tunics charms that were coated with dirt, and smelling with leather, sweat and exotic oils. The negroes of Madagascar were of medium height, looking like embryos, very dark and silent.
They slipped on the straps, and at my command began carrying the wounded with quiet unconcern, as if they were unloading bales of cotton at the docks.
I was content, or rather reassured. The A.C.A., surfeited at last, worked at high pressure, and hummed like well-tended machines that drip with oil, shining and flashing from every point.
Flash! The word is not too strong. I was dazzled on entering the operating hut. Night had just fallen—one of those warm beautiful nights of this brutal spring. The gunfire came and went in short spasms, like a sick giant. The wards of the hospital overflowed with a heaving mass of pain, and death was trying to restore order there. I breathed in deeply the night air of the garden and, as I was saying, I entered the operating hut.